How to Grow from “Thought Leader” to Actually Leading

Published in

Startup Grind

3 min readDec 6, 2016

There are many gates you’ll need to pass through.

How to Lead Yourself

First, learn to take responsibility for your own work. Deliver what you say you will, make it clear when you can’t, be organized, etc.
Next pay attention to how your work affects others on your team. Don’t throw work over the wall… learn how to collaborate well.
From here, think about how you can do things that yield a multiplier effect for the rest of your team. Pay attention to net-net outcomes.

You can stop at this point if you want. Not everyone wants to be a leader-of-people and that is totally OK. Be a learner, a fixer, etc.

Want to go further with the human leadership stuff? Great!

Become a team lead, and learn how to communicate “up, down, and sideways” well.
You should know how your team fits into the larger goals of your organization, and it’s your job to align your team to those goals.
It is also your job to communicate to your organization the needs of your team, so you need to understand them well. Do this one-on-one.
At this point as a team lead you may still be doing production work, but do not allow yourself to be on the critical path.
Teach others your tech skills. Systematize the knowledge that’s buried in your head.
In cases where you can’t fully remove yourself from a process as an active developer, at least optimize things as much as possible.

At this point, you can stop if you want. The world needs plenty of in-the-trenches leaders. Many of the toughest decisions happen here.

Want to keep going farther down this road? Go for it!

Abandon your tech specialization in day-to-day work. As you go into a more pure leadership role, you will no longer be close enough to a single project to micromanage its implementation details.
This is a good thing, because in a higher level of leadership, treating any one project as if it’s the core focus is dangerous.
At this level, your job becomes: How do I max out our communication capabilities, speed up our learning cycles, reduce $$$ risks?
There is some high level purpose for which your organization exists. Figure it out, teach it, design processes that sustain it.
If you do work in higher-level leadership effectively, it is still profoundly technical in various ways. Businesses are complex systems.

At this point, you hit the hard part: Giving up operational control of lots of the small decisions, learning how to properly delegate.

This is the point I’m at right now, so I can’t go any farther. But I hope it helps.

If you enjoyed this post and are involved in software development in some way, you may also like my book, Programming Beyond Practices.