Vision Starts With Seeing People First
By : Karima Guerfali Lazzem - Best Training Academy
Today, I listened to a TEDx talk by Sharon Price John. One sentence — simple, almost understated — stayed with me long after her talk ended:
"Nobody cares about what you know until they know that you care."
No one is truly interested in what you know until they understand that you are sincerely interested in them.
This sentence reaches far beyond the world of management. It touches something profoundly human.
We spend so much time wanting to convince. We prepare presentations, strategies, action plans, dashboards. We refine our arguments, hoping their logic alone will be enough to bring people on board.
And yet, teams don't follow a brilliant idea. They follow an intention they can feel.
When colleagues understand that their leader is first seeking to listen — to understand their concerns, their aspirations, their worries, their motivations — something shifts. Resistance gradually gives way to trust. And it is that trust that opens the door to genuine engagement.
Sharing a vision, then, is not simply announcing a destination. It is building a map that everyone can read.
It means explaining why we are moving in this direction, what each person contributes to the journey, the challenges we will face together — and above all, the value of every individual in this collective adventure.
A strategic plan, however brilliant, remains a document until it becomes a shared understanding.
When each person understands the why, the how, and the role they play in collective success, motivation no longer depends solely on the leader. It becomes a distributed energy within the team.
This reflection also brought me back to my own way of teaching.
People often ask whether I always deliver the same trainings.
My answer is always the same: the fundamentals don't change — but none of my sessions ever resemble the one before.
The concepts stay identical. The models, the tools, the learning objectives as well.
What changes is the transmission. Each one is unique.
I never walk into a room intending to deliver a course. I walk in with the intention of building meaning.
Before speaking about leadership, communication, management, or change — I listen to the participants. I ask them what they are experiencing, the difficulties they are navigating, the successes they are proud of, the situations that leave them with questions. Then the concepts come alive through their own stories. Each notion becomes an answer to a real situation they themselves have named.
The slides are never the starting point. They become the destination.
At the end of the training, I share the learning materials — of course. But that document is no longer simply a course. It becomes the trace of a reflection we built together, all the way through.
When participants revisit a slide several weeks later, they don't just see a theoretical model. They remember a conversation, a colleague who shared an experience, an emotion they felt, a spark that happened in the room.
And that is precisely what I love about this work. I am not trying simply to transfer knowledge. I am trying to create the conditions in which each person can build their own understanding.
This way of teaching is deeply inspired by David Kolb's work on experiential learning. We learn more deeply when we start from a lived experience, take the time to question it, make sense of it — and then transform it into concepts and new actions.
It also connects with Malcolm Knowles's vision of adult learning: an adult learns more readily when they immediately grasp the relevance of what they are discovering, and when they can connect each new idea to their own reality.
Over the years, cognitive neuroscience has come to reinforce this conviction.
We retain far more easily what touches us emotionally than what we receive passively. Emotion doesn't replace learning — it is often the doorway into it.
That is probably why I work to build every training from the lived experiences of the group.
Because an idea told by a trainer can be interesting. But an idea discovered through one's own experience often becomes unforgettable.
In the end, this TED talk didn't simply remind me of an essential quality of leadership. It reminded me why I deeply love what I do — as a trainer, a coach, a mentor.
Whether we are accompanying a team, leading an organization, or facilitating a training — the real impact doesn't begin when we speak. It begins when others feel that we have truly listened.
That may be one of the greatest responsibilities of modern leadership:
- Not simply transmitting information — but creating understanding.
- Not simply asking for engagement — but giving people reasons to want to engage.
- Not simply driving change — but building that change with the very people who will bring it to life.
In a world where artificial intelligence, organizational transformations, and uncertainty continue to multiply, technical skills will always matter. But we will need even more leaders capable of creating meaning :
Because at its core, people are not simply waiting to be told where to go. They want to know they matter in the journey.
Because at its core, we don't need more people who transfer knowledge. We need more leaders, managers, and trainers capable of transforming knowledge into awareness.
And perhaps real learning — like real leadership — begins exactly there: when people feel that before wanting to be heard, we chose to understand them.
Sources
- Sharon Price John. The question that saved my company from bankruptcy. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_price_john_the_question_that_saved_my_company_from_bankruptcy
- David A. Kolb. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Second Edition. Pearson Education, 2015.
- Malcolm S. Knowles, Elwood F. Holton III & Richard A. Swanson. The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development. 8th Edition. Routledge, 2015.
- Mary Helen Immordino-Yang & Antonio Damasio. Leurs travaux montrent que les émotions jouent un rôle fondamental dans les processus d'apprentissage, de prise de décision et de mémorisation, en soulignant que la cognition et l'émotion sont profondément interdépendantes.
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