There’s a pattern that plays out in most engineering organizations. Someone who was a phenomenal individual contributor gets promoted. They were the best engineer in the room, now they’re responsible for a team, and the skills that made them exceptional at writing code are suddenly the wrong skills for the job.
Most companies handle this transition badly. They hand the new lead a copy of “The Manager’s Path” and hope for the best. Some send them to a two-day leadership workshop. Almost none of it sticks, because the real learning happens in the uncomfortable moments that books don’t cover.
Making yourself unnecessary
The paradox of engineering leadership is that your success is measured by your team’s ability to function without you.
A mediocre lead hoards information. They’re the only one who understands the deployment pipeline, the only one who can approve production changes, the only one who has context on the critical path. They’ve made themselves essential, which feels like job security. It’s actually the opposite. They’ve become a bottleneck, and bottlenecks get resolved, one way or another.
A good lead distributes context. They document decisions and the reasoning behind them. At least two people understand every critical system. Information flows outward from team meetings, not just inward.
At Cognito Technologies, this was a conscious practice. Every architectural decision got written down. Not for compliance, not for process, but because the team needed to be able to move forward when the lead was in back-to-back meetings, on PTO, or dealing with an incident.
The feedback that changed how I lead
Early in my management career, a direct report told me: “You’re great at telling us what to do. You’re not great at telling us why.”
That stung, and it was right. I was optimizing for execution speed. Here’s the ticket, here’s the approach, go. Fast, efficient, and completely misaligned with building a team that could think for itself.
I started giving context first. Here’s the problem we’re solving, here’s why it matters, here’s the constraint we’re working under. Now: what do you think we should do?
Sometimes the team’s answer was better than mine. Sometimes it wasn’t. But the team got better at thinking through problems, and I got better at identifying gaps in my own reasoning.
What servant leadership actually looks like in practice
It’s not about being selfless or putting yourself last. It’s about being deliberate about where you spend your attention.
When a team member is stuck, you don’t take the keyboard away. You ask questions until they see the path themselves. When organizational chaos hits, you absorb it and translate it into clear priorities so your team can keep shipping. You celebrate someone else’s win with the same energy you’d give your own.
The leaders who changed my career weren’t the ones who gave me the most opportunities. They were the ones who made me feel like I could handle the opportunities I already had.