Everyone’s acting like AI rewrote the leadership playbook. It didn’t. Some tactics have shifted, but the core practice of leadership remains. Here are some axioms for effective tech leaders I’ve collected over the years. They’ve stood the test of time and are well worth your attention. How well do you have them sorted?
Executive Leadership is Long-Term
The very first step to becoming a senior leader is learning how to execute on the important and not just the urgent. I’m sure that there are many daily fires you have to put out, and there’s the constant pull of “getting things done.” Many tech leaders actually based their careers on executing things fast. But there comes a point where you have to change your balance and ensure that you gaze at the distance as well.
I recently got to see a CTO who was treading water, even though always burning the midnight oil and working hard without slacking. That’s because his efforts were focused on short-term gains, meaning the team never got to undergo some necessary “upgrades” to get to the next level and improve. Only by allowing yourself to also focus on those things can you achieve long-term success.
Technology As Innovative Asset
I fell in love with coding when I was nine years old because I was enamored with the idea of creating something out of nothing. If you can imagine it, you can create it. Technology teams should be constant providers of innovation to the business, regularly creating more and more assets that yield a positive return. Now that AI has made it so much easier to create software for anyone, it just means that it is even more important for your team to push the company forward.
Your role as an executive is to take care of this business-innovation bond and ensure that it produces ongoing value, rather than becoming a liability. Your peers in the company are not likely to be able to envision what can be made possible with your team’s capabilities. It is up to you to make it known and “take the initiative,” as chess players say.
Coders Without Borders
The best teams are those that work well together. Rather than having a cadre of individuals all working on their isolated tasks, a team works together, with each person helping the others. The right mentality is that of winning (or failing) together. It doesn’t matter if the mobile engineer got the app ready on time if her teammate, the backend engineer, won’t be ready. Teams have ownership of the entire stack of their product. Team members help one another and, for example, fix bugs not directly under their purview simply because that’s the right thing to do.
You should take this mindset a step further. The best tech leadership is directed at enabling success for the entire business. Don’t dismiss what other departments are doing as less critical, easier, or voodoo (a particularly common way for engineers to describe sales and marketing). Instead, use your position as an executive to create a culture where ownership cuts across departments—coders without borders. Your team can create rapid momentum when it doesn’t point fingers and lends a hand.
I have been saying this about coders without borders since before the pandemic, and because it’s an axiom, it’s just getting even more important. I recently published a video about the modern iteration of this: Senior Engineers Don’t Wait.
Great Teams Are Made of Layers of Force Multipliers
Every productive group is a living organism filled with more and more force multipliers. You’ve heard of the fabled “10X Engineer” in the past. While some engineers might be able to bang out code rapidly, the real 10X (or even 20X or 100X) engineers are those who can strengthen the others around them. Similar to Andy Grove’s concept of leverage in High Output Management, I believe that each person has the responsibility to act as a force multiplier for colleagues.
Individual contributors can help one another by speaking up, taking ownership, mentoring, and so on. Managers help their direct reports grow and reach self-actualization and work along with their peers in different departments to generate rapid impact. Executives like yourself cultivate cultures of excellence, compile a strategy and a vision, and act as a positive force.
Engineering as Partner, Not Vendor
Tech isn’t a service desk taking orders and isn’t the gatekeeper of the backlog. It ought to be a business partner that shapes what gets built by weighing feasibility, risk, and ideas. Your role isn’t to grab the incoming requests as fast as possible and rush to execute, no questions asked.
You have to view yourself as a peer of the rest of the executives, and that will allow them to view you the same. That way, you avoid creating a feature factory and set up your team to do high-impact work.
It is usually the CTO who knows their place and acts as a peer who then gets a seat around the table where the important discussions are held. That’s how you move upstream, gain more context, understand better what’s happening, and, eventually, can help shape the company’s strategy and direct it better.
Onward
Use these axioms to aid you in positioning your organization to achieve dramatic results. Ensure that you are manifesting them in your day-to-day and are aligned with them when it comes your mindset. And if you ever need help upgrading yourself and leveraging these axioms, reach out.