The first meeting I chaired with senior developers, I talked for forty of the sixty minutes. I walked out thinking it went well. It did not. The decisions we made in that meeting were reversed within two weeks because the people who knew the most had been given the least time to speak.
I was 15. That is not an excuse, but it is context.
Turkish has a useful distinction that English blurs. Duymak means to hear: a passive act, requiring no effort. Your ears receive sound whether you want them to or not. Dinlemek means to listen: an active act, requiring attention and intention. The root is tın, which means breath, rest, stillness. To listen, etymologically, is to become still.
English collapses both into "hear" and "listen" with roughly similar connotations. Turkish makes the gap explicit. You can duymak someone for an hour and absorb nothing. Dinlemek for five minutes can change a decision.
Running a company at any age requires making decisions with incomplete information. The information you lack is almost always sitting in someone else's head. The only way to access it is to listen. Not to hear their words while formulating your response, but to actually listen, with the possibility that what they say will change your mind.
This is harder than it sounds. The instinct, especially when you are the person in charge, is to have an answer. People look to you for direction. Silence feels like uncertainty. The pressure to speak, to fill the gap, to project confidence, is constant.
What I have learned, slowly and through repeated failure, is that the most useful thing a leader can do in a room full of capable people is ask a question and then stop talking.
There is a third level beyond hearing and listening. In Turkish it is called etkin dinleme, active listening. It means not just absorbing what someone says but trying to understand why they are saying it. What is the concern behind the suggestion? What is the fear behind the objection? What does this person know that I do not?
This requires setting aside your own agenda entirely. Most conversations, if we are honest, are not exchanges. They are alternating monologues. Each person waits for the other to finish so they can say what they were already planning to say. The kind of listening where you let someone else's input reshape your thinking in real time is rare enough to be remarkable when it happens.
I chair meetings differently now. I speak last. I ask more questions than I answer. I have learned to sit with the discomfort of silence, because the best contributions usually come from the person who needed an extra three seconds to decide whether to speak.
The meeting where I talked for forty minutes was not a meeting. It was a lecture. I just did not know the difference yet.