When the Cheese Is Moved: Listening That Acts

 



In Who Moved My Cheese?, Johnson (1998) describes employees keep returning to the place where the cheese used to be — the familiar, the safe, the predictable. They grieve the loss of what worked before. They wait for someone to put the cheese back.

That’s where actionable listening comes in.

Most managers practice active listening: they nod, they empathize, they take notes. But when the cheese has moved, empathy alone doesn’t help people find the new path.

Actionable listening means hearing with the intent to act on what’s heard — to translate insight into change.

When employees keep going back to the old cheese, leaders who employ actionable listening ask (formally through a reverse evaluation and informally through management by walking about or incidental conversations):

  • Do you know where the cheese is now?

  • Why do you keep going back to the old place? (Is it habit? Do you forget where the cheese is now? Do you not like where it is -- why? Do you feel unsafe in the new space? Is there some system missing that would be helpful?)

Then, management works together with employees to remove the barrier to finding the cheese. Actionable listening seeks to find out the motivations and reasons behind an action and then move together with employees to find a solution to which management then holds itself accountable and encourages employees to hold themselves and management accountable.

It’s not about blame; it’s about partnership. And, importantly, it is about accountability. That’s how the cheese gets found again — not by moving it back, but by moving forward together.

image and some content AI-generated


Read more posts about listening to lead: MSI Press Blog

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Post inspired by the forthcoming book, Listening to Lead (Alanazi and Leaver)


For more posts on the topic of listening to lead, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Mowafiq Alanazi, click HERE.

For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.





Book Description:

Most leadership problems are not caused by poor strategy, weak vision, or lack of talent. They are caused by something far more basic: leaders who do not truly listen. 

In L2L Listening to Lead: Demystifying the Dynamics of Power; What Weak Leaders Fear and Strong Leaders Cultivate, the authors--drawing on decades of leadership experience across governments, higher education, the private sector, and social impact organizations--reveal a powerful principle: organizations thrive when listeners listen in way that create genuine partnership.

Most leaders practice active listening, but active listening alone is not enough. What transforms organizations is interactive listening--a leadership practice that invites followers to become candid contributors and shared owners of problems, solutions, and innovation.

At the heart of this book is a powerful leadership tool called reverse evaluation, a structured method that allows leaders to learn from the people they lead. When used well, it rebuilds trust, energizes discouraged teams, and unlocks creativity that hierarchical leadership often suppresses.

Practical, experience-driven, and grounded in real leadership experience, Listening to Lead shows how organizations become not only more effective--but truly alive.

Keywords:

leadership; listening; organizational culture; employee engagement; stakeholder engagement; leader-follower partnership; servant leadership; reverse evaluation; bottom-up evaluation; empowerment; organizational health; inclusive leadership; interactive listening; active listening; navigating power dynamics; leader types; organizational development; organizational structure; functional alignment in an organization; change dynamics; transformational organizational change


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