Leadership in Technology

I posted a story about leadership and empathy about a week ago. I had an interesting comment that said, “…We seem to have an abundance of managers and a shortage of true leaders,” and that got me thinking. What advice would I give someone early in their career? What do I wish I had learned earlier in my career?

The manager/leader problem is more visible in engineering than I think anywhere else in the corporate space.

Engineering teams don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they lack leadership capacity. The kind that creates clarity, alignment, and system‑level health. So why do we end up with more managers than leaders?

Because most orgs unintentionally design for management:

• They reward task completion, not system thinking
• They promote the best ICs without teaching them how to lead humans
• They optimize for delivery pressure instead of decision quality
• They treat empathy as optional instead of a core engineering skill
• They build processes that require oversight instead of ownership

Managers keep the backlog moving. Leaders build the environment where great engineering can happen. And engineering desperately needs more of the latter.

If we want more leaders, we have to build systems that produce them. Teach engineers how to think in systems, not tasks

• Develop decision‑making muscles, not escalation paths
• Reward clarity, communication, and alignment, not heroics
• Build trust loops where empathy fuels accountability
• Give people room to lead before you give them a title
• Model the behaviors you want repeated

Leadership in engineering isn’t about being the smartest person in the room.
It’s about creating a room where smart people can actually succeed.

If we want stronger engineering orgs, we don’t need more managers.
We need leaders who can see the system, shape it, and elevate the people inside it.