Staying Technical
Over at the Rands Leadership Slack, there’s a #ask-rands-anything channel and sometimes I just crush it in terms of answers. A member asked me about why I remain technical as a senior leader:
The mistake I made was thinking part of the job of growing as a manager/leader was the delegation of all the things, including the technical know-how of how a feature was built. Yes, you should delegate more as a leader. No, you shouldn’t forget what it takes to build things because how they’re built is changing as rapidly as what is being built.
It’s a common mistake because you have people like me hollering that delegation is the key to leadership scale.
Anyhoo, how I knew I’d gone too far and was too hands-off was when someone on the team described how they were deploying a build, and I asked a question where it became painfully clear I had no idea how containers worked. The silence in the room was deafening. The question they were thinking but did not ask was, “How can this person lead if they have no F’ing clue how this stuff works?”
So, I dialed up the technical again. Haven’t stopped.
In unrelated news, there’s a new Important Thing.