Aug 8, 2026

Build leaders, not dependencies

The best sign that you're leading well may be that fewer things need to come through you.

• #leadership
• #management
• #engineering

Early in my management career, being needed felt like a good thing.

Someone had a question.

They came to me.

A decision needed to be made.

I made it.

Something was stuck.

I helped unblock it.

It felt productive.

It also doesn’t scale.

The invisible queue

If every important decision needs to come through one person, that person becomes a queue.

The team waits.

The manager gets busier.

Decisions slow down.

Eventually, the manager starts working longer hours to keep up.

That isn’t leadership.

That’s a bottleneck with a job title.

Delegation isn’t handing over tasks

I’ve changed how I think about delegation over time.

Delegating a task is easy.

Delegating a decision is harder.

You have to give someone enough context to make the decision themselves — what outcome actually matters, what constraints are fixed versus negotiable, and when they should loop you in versus just deciding.

Then you have to let them make the decision.

Even when you would have made a different one.

That’s the difficult part.

People need room to make mistakes

If you want people to take ownership, they need room to make imperfect decisions.

Not every mistake is a failure of management.

Sometimes it’s simply the cost of someone becoming better at the job.

The manager’s role is to make sure the mistake is recoverable and the lesson isn’t lost.

The real measure of leadership

I’ve become much more interested in what happens when I’m not around.

Can the team make decisions?

Can engineers challenge an approach?

Can someone else run the planning conversation?

Can a manager handle a difficult situation without escalating everything?

If the answer is yes, that’s a healthy organization.

The best sign that you’re doing your job as a leader isn’t that everyone needs you. It’s the opposite — and honestly, the moment I noticed it working was mundane: a release went out fine on a day I was in back-to-back meetings and hadn’t looked at it once. Nobody mentioned it as a big deal. That’s exactly what it should feel like.