A CTO who runs a flawless engineering org with clean architecture, a happy team, and great velocity, while Product is a mess, Sales is flailing, and the company is quietly dying? Now more than ever, it’s clear that tech leaders are often only as limited as they make themselves. Many have already realized that the sky is the limit for them and are leveraging that agency. If you’re thinking you ought to “stay in your lane,” you’re constricting yourself.
Auto-pigeonholing is the tendency to preemptively shrink one’s scope at work, in our case, particularly the senior tech leaders. Done not because anyone told them to, but because they told themselves to. Either way, it’s wrong.
Where It Comes From
There are various reasons leaders convince themselves to pigeonhole. First, there’s the courtesy mistake. That’s when they think that by becoming involved in other areas of the company, they will be stepping on others’ toes. This is misreading respect for others as self-erasure.
Then we have the impostor whisper: “I can’t, I just know tech.” Treating anything that’s outside their org as if it were rocket science, whereas I’m pretty sure someone who can discuss debugging a distributed system can understand the sales funnel enough to ask a question or two.
Another reason is the job description trap. When you take your role or your title too literally and assume you’re not supposed to do anything beyond that. Worse, some believe the CEO will reprimand them for doing so.
The Rebuttals
Tech is now everywhere. It’s no longer solely about developing the product itself. It’s how every function operates. The tech leader who only thinks about the product is like deciding to only use the right side of the chessboard. When you’re becoming aware of what’s happening all over the company, you can help utilize technology better, or come up with approaches and suggestions to help the other departments achieve their goals. It also means you’ll be able to prepare your team better, because you’ll understand what’s happening all around, as opposed to merely following orders.
Moreover, your outsider status is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, you’re not a sales expert. That means that you see things differently. You ask different questions. You’re not limited by the assumptions of that domain. That’s valuable, if you choose to use it. You can suggest things others wouldn’t consider, and your common sense filter is tuned differently. Your fresh perspective is actually an advantage.
Lastly, you can’t organize deck chairs while the ship sinks. If the rest of the company is struggling, your excellent R&D org won’t save you. It’s more than merely your right to engage. It’s your responsibility as an executive. Of course, you cannot fix everything in the company, but when you decide to stick your head in the sand and stop trying, you might as well look for a different job.
You’re not a tech person who sits at the executive table. You’re an executive who happens to have a deep technical background. That background is an asset across the whole company, not a fence that marks your property or where you’re allowed to go.
Tech leaders grow faster when they stop waiting for permission to care about the whole business.