The first of four levels of listening introduced in the U.Lab course is called "downloading," wherein we apply what we already know and bring a situation down into that schema. The second, "factual listening," is where we observe the world, perhaps noticing things beyond what we might normally notice through downloading. The third is listening empathically, from another point of view, and the fourth is a generative listening, wherein there is no longer a "you," but a field, an emerging future, within which all elements are in a dance together, and "you" are the field. This is where leading through listening happens.
As a way into understanding leading through listening, Otto Scharmer introduces and plays a clip of Zubin Mehta conducting two orchestras accompanying a superstar tenor Placido Domingo, before a large audience. My first thought watching the clip was that I lacked the intertextual background that might have granted me some access to the significance of what it means for this conductor to be conducting this orchestra and tenor. "Leopold" came to mind, the "famous" conductor Bugs Bunny played to give the egotistical soloist his just deserts. It appeared that Mehta was doing more that just keeping time just near the end, when he was "being with" Domingo, and punching the bursts of music out of the orchestra, or maybe it was the orchestra and Domingo pulling the punches out of Mehta.
That is the point: what makes Mehta a great conductor/leader is that he constitutes himself as the space, the "Being," within which the orchestra, and tenor, and audience, and himself (as an "instrument") all dance in a kind of harmony that isn't just "musical": it's being in the world.
Scharmer calls it "presencing": the moment where "you" give up your "you-ness" to be used by Being, which then allows being to return to the world as meaningfully present. This is the meaning of Heidegger's term "ex-sistence": standing out ahead of itself returning to meaningful presence.