Wise leaders buy more than they sell. Let me explain.
When we talk, we are selling. When we listen, we are buying. Great leaders need to learn how to buy.
Welcome to leadprompt.sh // executing leadership from the root. I’m your host, John Collins.
One of the hardest things a leader needs to do is simply listen. Our natural instinct, especially for those of us who came up through engineering and technical tracks, is to take immediate control of a situation. We want to steer the conversation, fix the problem on the whiteboard, and start handing out action items. After all, we were hired to lead, right? We feel this constant, underlying pressure to prove our value by having the smartest answer in the room.
But many times, the real power play is not to speak. It is to listen.
When we step back and allow others to speak, they are effectively selling their ideas, their opinions, and their perspectives to us. That dynamic is incredibly revealing. In order to sell, they have to lay out their positions, expose their priorities, and show you how they think. You are taking in all this valuable data, and the best part? You are not obligated to act on any of it immediately. It is an incredibly useful exercise in gathering intelligence before committing to a technical or organizational direction.
Let the Silence Hang
Most people absolutely hate a prolonged silence in a conversation. In fact, we literally call it an "awkward silence" because of the physical discomfort it induces. But to a seasoned leader, this isn't awkward at all. It is a highly calibrated tool that you should be using on a regular basis, especially in your one-on-ones.
Here is how you use it: ask an open-ended question, get their initial response, and then just wait. Hold gentle eye contact. Let the silence linger in the room until they feel compelled to break it, not you.
When people babble to fill a silence, they drop their guard. They move past their prepared, polished answers and start revealing what is actually going on underneath the surface. This is when you really start buying! Let them babble. Do not interrupt them to agree, and definitely don't interrupt to correct them. You will learn infinitely more by letting them empty their head than you ever will by talking over them to prove a point.
Conversely, I am always highly suspicious of people on my team who do not attempt to sell to me. If I leave space and they don't fill it, I have to ask myself why. Why do they not feel compelled to pitch their ideas? Do they have nothing to sell? Are they completely disengaged? Or do they simply feel that talking to me is not worth their time because I won't listen anyway?
None of those answers are good. This quietness is a subtle, critical clue into the mindset of the individual. I experienced this recently: one of my tech leads went unusually quiet on me for a few months. He stopped pushing back on architecture, stopped pitching new initiatives, and just coasted in our one-on-ones. That silence lasted right up to the point of him handing in his resignation. My early interventions didn't work, but the warning signs were flashing red purely through what he wasn't saying.
Buy When You Interview
This concept is hardest to apply when you are sitting in the candidate's chair. When you are interviewing for a new role, every fibre of your being is screaming at you to sell yourself to your prospective new employer. You want to list your achievements, your frameworks, your successful migrations. But if you sell too hard, you can come across as needy, or even desperate. That is not a great look for a senior leader.
Instead, you need to flip the script. You need to let them babble about how things are going in the company, what specific scaling issues they are having, and why they felt the pain acutely enough to want to hire someone like you in the first place. You are buying context.
I was once hired by a CEO over breakfast in his hotel for a VP of Engineering role. For the first twenty minutes of the conversation, he spoke entirely uninterrupted. He poured out his challenges regarding the poor delivery of his software engineering team, the missed deadlines, the technical debt: everything I would be expected to come in and fix. I just drank my tea and bought every word he was selling.
After he finally finished, I paused and told him, "I don't want you to leave this meeting without learning about me." I then gave him a highly targeted, twenty-minute pitch about my experience and skill-set, a pitch that was heavily customized based on the pain points he had just handed me on a silver platter. He listened intently, hit me with some smart questions at the end, and we wrapped up.
I got the job, and I worked closely with him for the next five years. He later told me that a massive part of the reason he hired me was simply because I was a good listener. I didn't rush in to sell; I bought the problem first.
Learn to buy, learn to listen, and you will never stop learning something new.
Until next time, keep executing from the root.
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