Reflections on Leadership
Over the past 20 years, I’ve led in many different ways: managing projects, running academies with hundreds of participants, organizing conferences, and leading a department of more than 30 engineers in a major enterprise.
I didn’t start out aspiring to be a leader. I’m a technical person, more introverted than extroverted, and happiest when solving problems in front of a screen. But leadership found me, again and again.
What I wish I had known earlier is that leadership is not about being the hardest worker or the smartest problem-solver. It’s about creating the conditions for others to succeed — and doing it in a way that’s sustainable for them and for you.
Here are eight reflections that, looking back, I believe matter most.
1. Balance Scope and Capabilities
Every leadership role exists because of a purpose inside the company. You are trusted with a scope — a set of expectations, responsibilities, and constraints. But you’re also trusted with a group of people, each with their own capabilities, strengths, and desires.The first responsibility of leadership is to bring these two things into balance: the scope you’re expected to deliver, and the team you have to deliver it.
If they don’t match, you have two choices:
- Reshape the team (develop, reorganize, hire, or sometimes reduce), or
- Renegotiate the scope with stakeholders.
Pretending the mismatch isn’t there just sets you and your team up for failure. The leaders who last are the ones who face this early and directly.
2. Build Relationships First
The most important leadership tool you have is the relationship you build with your direct reports. Processes, goals, and structures all matter — but without trust at the personal level, they collapse.
Leadership starts with knowing your people: what motivates them, where they struggle, what they want for the future, and how you can support them. These conversations aren’t side work or “soft skills.” They are the work.
Everything else you do as a leader rests on this foundation.
3. Build the Team
A group of skilled individuals is not automatically a team. A true team has a shared mission, mutual trust, and the confidence that someone will have their back when things get tough.
Your job is to create the conditions where that kind of team can emerge. That means more than handing out tasks. It means shaping rituals, building trust, and creating a vision people can rally behind.
Outputs are easier to measure, but outcomes flow from trust and alignment first.
4. Don’t Get in the Way of Your Team
As an engineer, my instinct was to jump in and do the work myself. Sometimes I could do it faster, sometimes at a higher quality bar. But I eventually realized I wasn’t helping — I was getting in the way.
Your role is not to compete with your team for the work they are responsible for. Your role is to support, to remove obstacles, and to make it easier for them to succeed.
Do the work of leadership, not the work of your team.
5. Trust Beats Control
Micromanagement feels safe but slows everything down. When all decisions flow upward, the leader becomes the bottleneck.
The real leverage comes from pushing decisions down. The people closest to the work have the context to act — if you give them the agency and trust.
Trust creates speed. Trust builds ownership. Trust is what turns a group into a self-sustaining, resilient team.
6. Be a Gardener
Leadership is not like building a machine. You can’t force outputs by pulling harder on the levers.
It’s much closer to gardening. You prepare the soil, water regularly, and remove weeds. You can’t make growth happen directly — but you can make growth inevitable.
As a leader, you don’t guarantee outcomes. You create the environment where outcomes can flourish.
7. Take Care of Yourself
For a long time, I treated rest and recovery as luxuries — things I’d get to once the real work was done. I now see them as part of the work.
Sleep, family time, reflection, exercise: these aren’t indulgences. They are leadership tools. Without them, you burn out. And when you burn out, your team will feel it too.
Take care of yourself so you can keep showing up for others.
8. Rewrite Your Story — and Your Team’s
For years I told myself: I’m just an engineer. I’m not a people person. I’m not a natural manager. Those stories limited me far more than reality did.
Leadership isn’t about personality. It’s about practice. You can learn to negotiate scope, build trust, and create an environment for success — if you first let go of the stories that hold you back.
The same is true for your team. Don’t let history or past performance dictate the story you believe about what they can become. The past is memory and narrative. Tomorrow doesn’t have to be bound by yesterday’s story.
Conclusion
Leadership is not about being the hero or the hardest worker. It’s about building a team, that is rallied around a shared mission and set-up for success. A great leader creates the conditions for people to do their best work, and gets out of the way.