There’s virtually no chance that you’re reading this and don’t already know that the key to unlocking your team’s effectiveness is empowering them. I don’t see many tech executives who need to be told this. You can directly see that when you don’t empower them and don’t delegate, you end up micromanaging them, and they cannot be as creative and impactful as they otherwise might be.

Micromanagement is still too prevalent in many organizations, big and small. However, I have noticed the opposite happen as well. That is when we veer too far here and provide vast autonomy without proper…

Let me share one of the open secrets of consultants: sometimes, a big part of our work relies merely on listening to people in the company and what they have to say. I routinely hear from CEOs and executives that the situation is “great” and that there are no issues regarding X. Then, I sit down to talk with some of the employees. That is the stage where I get torrents of valuable information. Think about it, I’m meeting someone for the first time, often in Zoom, and they disclose issues and problems they never voiced to their long time…

Every time I bring my car to the shop for its yearly checkup, I get nervous. I’m completely clueless. They’d tell me that I need to replace the thingamabob and the whatchamacallit, it costs like a new MacBook Pro, and I’d just stare blankly. I have no way of knowing if that makes sense or not. My solution was to buy a new car with a warranty.

Many of my clients have a similar kind of issue with their engineering organizations. CEOs would ask me if the time estimates or headcount they are getting are sensible because they have no…

A typical issue I see for first-timer CTOs/VPEs is that they do not fully comprehend the meaning of being executives. Tech executives that have the tech part nailed down, but not the exec part. In my upcoming book, The Tech Executive Operating System, I call these glorified managers. They have a fancier title, but, at their core, they are still doing the same things any good manager would do.

Based on my work with tech executives worldwide, I want to share what I see as the necessary focus shifts and personal upgrades to leverage your new role fully.

Move Upstream

First, you…

Do you ever wonder what makes certain teams gain momentum while others seem to be at a standstill? I’ve written about floating leaders in the past. They seem to drift without purpose, and when that’s the case, the team rarely has any chance of being any different. Leadership has a lot of parts to it, but one of the most important is creating forward motion, and that does not come about without making timely decisions.

By making decisions that are rightly within your purview, you allow the rest of the organization to move forward. Whenever you waffle and delay, you…

A phenomenon that I have witnessed occurring to tech executives in all sizes of companies and with varying degrees of experience is that they trigger increased scrutiny and meddling. I find that most CEOs out there do not default to micromanagement-they genuinely are interested in entrusting the R&D organization to an executive that they rely on. Nevertheless, when eventually something goes off track, and they do not handle it correctly, they are, in fact, beckoning for the CEO to swoop in.

Unfortunately, the triggering of micromanagement rarely makes things better. After all, had micromanagement worked most of the time, we…

A new year is a great time to stop doing some things you’re only doing because of momentum. Here are some of my favorite things to help clients stop doing, ranging from tiny stuff to career-altering steps.

• Cancel those “syncs” for old projects and initiatives that, for some reason, were never canceled but stopped being valuable four months ago.
• Stop solving things for your people; create guidelines.
• Spend less time interviewing. Unless you’re interviewing direct reports, you should very rarely be used in interview processes to filter. …

I’ve discussed in the past the problem of having too many contenders for every new managerial position. At some companies, it can feel like every single person is just waiting to get into management, to the point where managers are afraid of asking their employees about their wishes so as not to trigger another person being “added to the queue.” Other companies seem to suffer from the complete opposite: there are no suitable candidates for promotion. Some might be interested, but leadership finds them not ready yet or incompatible.

When it comes to leading an engineering organization, especially one that…