Before I was even a manager, I had one silly illusion in my head: that leadership was equal to provision of answers, having a plan, and ensuring everyone worked to that plan. Like, that was my mental model: if I knew the code, I could lead the team, right? Spoiler alert: wrong. My name’s Clara Reynolds, and I lead a 15-person tech team in Portland. When I got the promotion to product management, I thought I was ready. There were the skills, the resume, and the energy, but what I hadn’t begun to fathom was just how loud my own voice could be in meetings.

I recall one Monday morning: I was showing the new sprint goals. Everybody nodded in that polite way, but you could sense that the energy was… flat. Then there was a murmur from Sam, one of our quieter developers, about a possible bug in the app logic that had gone unnoticed. And then it hit me—wait, I hadn’t been listening. I’d been talking, just filling space, thinking I was guiding when really I was missing signals.

Listening Is Harder Than Coding

It is strange to think that such a natural act as listening is indeed a learned skill. Studies have been made to prove this. According to the Harvard Business Review, 30% of a team’s engagement can be increased by managers who listen. Numbers are great but watching it happen in real life is different. When I started paying attention to what people weren’t saying, patterns emerged.

We had a project tracker, but it was not quite so intuitive to the subtle frustration or anticipation in the room. Hence, I approached a mobile app development Portland team to build a super-light internal feedback app—basically, just a small dashboard wherein after the meetings, team members can post some quick reactions. Not invasive at all, just enough to say “OK” to trends.

Tiny Things Matter

I learned that even if he does not hear words, it does not mean a person doesn’t listen. Everything is important- gestures, pauses, tone when someone is NOT saying “I’m fine.” One afternoon I started observing Ana, our designer. She was fiddling more with her notebook than engaging in a planning session. Instead of assuming she was distracted, I asked her to share her thoughts privately. She actually had ideas on how to redesign the onboarding flow but didn’t want to interrupt the meeting. One such conversation reshaped the priorities of the sprint in ways that weren’t calculable for me.

Statista claims that 65% of employees in the U.S. feel that their ideas aren’t considered by leadership. I wanted our team to be part of the 35% that did feel heard.

Feedback Loops Beyond the Office

We were quite early on in the internal app integration when I found that I needed more insights. Thus, I referred it to a mobile app development company in Los Angeles to help us better the dashboard- notifications for check-ins, a simple sentiment tracker, nothing lavish. At first, I thought it would feel contrived but it didn’t. It gave airtime to soft voices and allowed me time to process before reacting. It was like learning to read air currents rather than staring at the windmill itself.

The more you hear, the more contradictions you hear between what people supposedly want. One is autonomy, another guidance, and the others all happiness, which one can’t provide of course. I keep tripping there.

Ripple Effect

When I really focused on listening, meetings changed. They became about much less reporting progress and much more about discovery. I’d ask Sam, “What’s the weirdest thing you noticed this week?” or Ana, “If you could redesign anything in our process, what would it be?” It was very basic, but the energy had been changed. People were laughing more, arguing more, and sharing mistakes more, critically without fear.

Even our sprint velocity improved—not just because we fixed bugs faster but because there was less miscommunication. A Pew study found that teams with transparent communication practices report 21% higher satisfaction. I mean it’s hard to measure exactly, but I could feel it.

Lessons From Listening

• Stop filling the space: I had to unlearn over-explaining. Sometimes, a pause works better than a solution.

• Listen for unsaid signals: Nobody says everything that bugs him or her. A stare, a puff, a tardy response—they’re all indicators.

• Iterate softly: Our software allows team members to offer responses one at a time. It does not solve all problems, but it brings out patterns that would otherwise have escaped me.

• Contradictions are fine: Not every recommendation will be executed, and that’s fine. What matters is validating that somebody had their say.

Leadership guru Megan Tully once quipped, “Leaders often mistake talking for action, but listening is the subtle architecture behind effective teams.” I’ll add that it’s messy—and frustrating and ongoing, but it’s the work that actually changes outcomes.

Paradox of Leadership

I keep coming back to this. Leading by listening isn’t passive. It’s active in a quiet way. Still, I make decisions, still push deadlines, still enforce standards – but now I’m noticing subtleties. I notice when someone hesitates, when the excitement fades, when ideas compete silently. It’s exhausting, honestly, but it’s also… kind of exhilarating?

I often ask myself whether I am being too analytical; perhaps, this whole listening thing isn’t such a great deal. Yet, a project everyone said would fail is successful; an argument that should have lingered died fast because one person was made to feel heard. There it is.

Why Technical Leaders Benefit

There’s always that tech leader impulse to default to code, architecture, schedules – and forget that it’s the human part that makes an app fail or succeed. I keep thinking about the feedback app we built with support from mobile app development Portland and advice from a mobile app development company in Los Angeles. It’s like trying to measure something with all the information around the something and not just the something itself.

It is also a great reminder that even in tech environments, there is a need for soft skills. listening magnifies empathy, patience, curiosity: all human skills you can’t simply shortcut through process alone.

Final Thoughts

I find myself smiling in a meeting sometimes and think, “Am I talking too much again?” And then I very purposefully pause. Look around, watch expressions, feel the hesitations. Ask a question and wait. Awkwardly so. Painfully slow at times. Because the impact is real.

Unlistening. Unflashy, non-KPI, devoid of dashboards, and charts. And yet, for my team, it’s all the threads holding things together–the unseen engine pushing progress forward.

I’ve come to appreciate the irony: the more I say nothing, the more happens. And perhaps that’s the lesson, less talking, more noticing, more absorbing. And sometimes, just sometimes that is enough.