Lens 03 · Leadership
Coach, not boss.
People first. Results matter. Sustainable results come through people. That sentence took me ten years to earn the right to say.
The core idea
The most expensive leadership mistakes are made by managers who are technically excellent and humanly impatient. The fix is not to be less excellent. The fix is to widen the bandwidth of how you treat people — to leave room for the version of them that has not happened yet.
Engineering leadership is the craft of being the person whose presence makes the team better — clearer, calmer, more honest, more ambitious — than it would be without you. That is the whole job.
My five culture principles
- Equality. Title is a coordination tool, not a status one. The most senior person in the room is not automatically right.
- Respect. The default tone in a 1-on-1 is the same tone you would use with someone you admire. Always.
- Accountability. Commitments are real. We hold ourselves and each other to them, with kindness.
- Shared success. When the team wins, the team wins. When the team loses, the leader was the closest to the loss.
- Clarity of purpose. Every engineer should be able to explain, in one sentence, why their current work matters. If they cannot, the leader has not done their job.
What we usually talk about
- The first 90 days. Whether you are inheriting a team or building one — what to do, what to deliberately not do, what to write down.
- Setting standards without becoming a tyrant. The difference between a high bar and a hostile bar. Most managers swing too far one way.
- 1-on-1s that matter. Most 1-on-1s are status meetings in disguise. How to make them the most useful 30 minutes of your week.
- Hard conversations. Underperformance, performance improvement, parting ways. How to do these honestly without losing your humanity or theirs.
- Leading through change. Reorgs, leadership transitions, strategy pivots. The team is reading you for signal you do not even know you are sending.
- Manager-of-managers. The transition that most senior engineers do not realise is yet another full re-skilling.
A line I keep on my wall
Coach, not boss. The team should remember how you made them feel as much as anything they shipped.