“Put your team in the right position, at the right time, with the right tools…and let them go win the game.”
In Part 1 of this series, I looked at the decision itself, including whether to take the step from doing the work to leading it. I also talked about why ego makes that call harder than it should be, and the questions worth answering before you decide. If you have not read it yet, start there.
This part picks up after the decision. Your proverbial roots are planted and your runway is visible. If you have chosen to lead (or even if you are seriously leaning that way), here is what actually changes. There are also some pitfalls I watch for in myself (and others), as well as some thoughts on what leadership can provide for you and your team when it is handled well.
What changes when you lead
If you do make the move, the biggest shift is learning to coach instead of doing. That sounds simple until you watch someone take a path that you would not have taken. Be honest with yourself about whether you can be hands-off. This means truly letting people make mistakes and allowing them to do things differently than you would. Sometimes they are going to get it wrong and it is not your job to step in immediately and take it over. In other words, don’t wait to patch the lifeboat, but build a strong vessel that allows for failures without detrimental impacts.
I was not always good at this. Early on, it was tempting to take the work back the moment it drifted from how I would have done it. That feels faster in the moment, but it teaches the team to wait for you, and it limits what they can grow into. Don’t be the lifeboat captain that patches holes. Instead, build strong ships that are meant to navigate the heavy seas.
What worked better for me was a simple pattern. I show people how I would approach the problem and ask whether they see anything I missed or would change. Then I let them do the work their own way, and afterward we compare. Sometimes my approach holds up. Often theirs is better, or we end up combining the two. Either way, we adopt what works, and I make sure everyone knows when it was their idea. The best idea always wins, and it does not matter whose it was. I touched on this “best idea” concept in my previous article (Build vs. Buy for Case Management: Start with the Data) and you will find that it is central to my overall belief system.
It doesn’t mean that I outsource decision making or that I desire to spread the risk across the team. What it means is that the team doing the work has a say in how that work is completed. I am not perfect and I cannot always make the right call. A leader would be foolish to even think that. If we go back to our college football coaching analogy in Part 1 of this series, a good leader can create the playbook, build out the offensive/defensive schemes, correct bad behaviors, and answer the tough media questions. What they cannot do is run the ball, make the passes, and get on the field to stop the other team during a critical drive. That is what the team is for. That is why you practice daily and that is why you play the game. There is no award for the best coach on a losing team. A player on the field sees things differently than a coach standing on the sidelines. Sometimes that player is right, and sometimes they are wrong. The point is that it is a valuable perspective to take into account.
As a leader, I would encourage you to lead teams like this. You ultimately still reserve final veto power, but it helps to hold the vote and let people know that they have skin in the game.
Ok, thanks for the analogies…but what does a leader need to do to be successful and what do they need to avoid?
The rest of the job is mostly translation and protection. You explain engineering constraints to executives and business priorities to engineers. You make sure the right people get the credit when things go well, and you have the hard conversations when they do not. Your technical background does not go away. It becomes the thing that lets you ask better questions and earn trust faster with the people doing the work. Some hands-on skills fade, but the judgment behind them evolves. Now, you are ideating on business cases, determining how to fund the team, and improving portfolios instead of single projects. This is a different landscape.
Different organizations have different mechanisms and frameworks, but below are some pitfalls we all should look to avoid.
Pitfalls worth avoiding
Most management failures are not dramatic. They are habits that feel reasonable at the time. These are the ones I watch for, both with others and in myself.
Letting ego and headcount become the scoreboard
It is easy to start measuring success by the size of your team, your budget, and your title. A bigger org chart feels like progress, and protecting it starts to feel like the job. Usually that is your ego talking. It is the same pull that moves a coach to a bigger stage, but inside an organization, it is also how fiefdoms form. Teams stop sharing people, data, and credit. Decisions get made to defend territory instead of to serve the people who use the product. Ego also makes it harder to admit when someone else has the better idea. Headcount and budget are tools for delivering outcomes. They are not the outcome, and neither is your title. If you are building a kingdom for yourself, what does that make your user base, customers, and employees? Hopefully they are not your “subjects” because you can’t “raise their taxes” when you are the one at fault.
Letting relationships beat ideas
Relationships matter, and some of my strongest working relationships started out as my most difficult ones. But there is a difference between earning trust and using it to skip the argument. When a decision goes a certain way because of who someone knows rather than what the idea is worth, the team notices. It is a weak way to lead, and it quietly teaches everyone that the best idea does not always win. Steve Jobs put the alternative well in 2010: “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. Otherwise, good people don’t stay.”
Forgetting that the work is human
Layoffs, terminations, and reorganizations are budget tools for an organization. However, for the people affected, and for their families, they are personal. As a leader, you will be part of decisions like these, and you will not always agree with them. The same tension could also show up in lesser ways, such as being asked to deliver a product in a direction you do not agree with.
Leaders need armor. Without it, every hard decision lands as a wound, and you cannot function. The real questions are how much armor you wear and what it is made of. Armor made of indifference protects you by making you care less. Armor made of clear values protects you because you already know what you stand for, where your limits are, and what you will and will not do. You represent the company, but you are also a person. Decide what your armor is made of before the battle arrives and not during it or after it.
Overcoaching and overprotecting
There is an opposite failure to taking the work back. Some leaders coach so much that nothing ships, or shield the team from so much pressure that they never learn to handle it. Protection is part of the job, but a team that never feels any weight tends to underdeliver and stops growing. Coaching should make people more capable, not more dependent on you.
Refusing to rock the boat
Every organization has a path of least resistance. For example, just say yes, just keep the peace, and avoid any conversation that might get you written up. The old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” captures that mindset. It is safe, and it is rarely what is best for the customer.
A better reminder is older. In 1928, John A. Shedd wrote, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” When quality, safety, or the user’s experience is at stake, someone has to speak up, even when it is uncomfortable. The leaders worth following rock the boat for their stakeholders. The rest do whatever keeps them from getting written up. Behind that armor we discussed in the previous paragraphs exists a backbone. Make sure you have one if you want to be a leader.
Becoming a reporter
It is possible to spend most of your week collecting status and stats from your team and repackaging it for leadership. Executives often appreciate it, and it can feel productive. It is not the job though. A leader who mostly handles reporting to management enables the creation of organizational layers that do not always impact the outcome.
Not showing up when it matters
Individual contributors can sometimes encounter rather sticky situations, especially with senior leadership and difficult stakeholders. A good leader will see this as their duty to help resolve. They will show up in force and back their team. Alternatively, if the team is out of line, then the leader needs to calm the stakeholders and suggest a path forward. Not addressing this in real time and outsourcing those tough discussions to other team members will create resentment and distrust with your team, your leadership, and your customer base.
What leading can give you and your team
None of those pitfalls are reasons to avoid management. When done well, the role offers things individual work cannot.
A team that wins
A good leader enables a team and protects it. When a struggling team turns a red project green, the change is not only on the status report. People enjoy their work more, they trust each other more, and the people the product serves get a better result. Being part of that kind of turnaround is one of the most satisfying things I have done. Even without formal recognition, there is a collective sigh of relief from everyone involved. People begin to smile more. The mood lightens. Staff grow more confident. And in the most dire circumstances, key stakeholder relationships are rebuilt and funding is restored.
A voice for the ideas you always cared about
As an individual contributor, you may have seen the right answer many times without the platform to push it. Leadership gives you that voice. You can shape the narrative, set priorities, and make the case for the things you always believed in.
Watching something grow
Some people love starting with a seed: setting up a team, defining how it works, and watching it grow into something that runs well without them in every conversation. If that appeals to you, leadership can be deeply rewarding.
Fighting for your people
A leader can push for higher pay, better tools, and better conditions for the team. That only works if you are willing to rock the boat. If you plan to keep every conversation comfortable, this benefit disappears, and your team will notice.
Bringing it all together
Across both parts of this series, the same idea keeps coming back. Whether you stay hands-on or step into leading, the decision holds up best when it grows from your roots and not from your ego. A move made for the title or the pay can shorten your runway, and as I covered in Part 1, a role that does not fit is hard to unwind, for you and for the organization. A move made from what you know, who you know, and the work that actually energizes you tends to keep paying off.
If you do choose to lead, the job changes in real ways. You coach instead of doing, you translate and protect, and you watch for the pitfalls that pull good leaders off course. But the best leaders I have worked with never fully cut ties with where they started. They learned when to lean on their roots and when to let the team carry the work, and that is where the role becomes the most rewarding.
If you recall from Part 1, the head coach sets the team up for success, but the players run the plays and execute the strategy. Put your team in the right position, at the right time, with the right tools…and let them go win the game.
When it works well, you get to be both
The best version of leadership that I have found is not a clean break from individual work. It is knowing when to step in and when to step back. For most of my career, I was good at taking a reported issue, narrowing it down to the specific problem, logging the bug, and validating the fix. As a leader, I still find it worth spending fifteen minutes to see whether I can identify the issue myself. If I can find it, it often makes more sense to log the bug directly than to delegate the investigation and translate it through someone else, especially when time is of the essence. At that point, I step back. I check on the status, make sure the fix is validated, communicate the patch timeline to the people waiting on it, and ask the team to let me know the final resolution. The team still owns the work, we identified the problem faster, and I have not slowed the process down by insisting on doing all of it myself or needing to be the center of attention.
That balance is the best answer I have found to the individual contributor versus manager question. The strongest leaders I have worked with never fully stopped being practitioners. They learned which moments called for which version of themselves.
Even after years of trying to find the right balance, I still often find myself validating that patch and bugfix late at night with a smile on my face…and unable (and unwilling) to shake the dirt off my roots entirely.
Working through something similar? I’m always happy to compare notes. Send me a message or connect on LinkedIn.
Sources
- Fortune, Steve Jobs on building a startup (remarks at the D8 conference), June 2, 2010.
- John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic, 1928.