Running an engineering organization is not simple or easy. Even experienced leaders can find it overwhelming, stressful, or taxing. However, we sometimes make it even harder on ourselves than it has to be. That’s because we don’t get help. How many times have you helped a struggling engineer get better by learning how to ask for help? The same advice applies to you.

Let’s quickly go over the vast amount of resources you probably have access to. You don’t always have to have all the answers and do it all alone.

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Coaching

This, in my biased opinion, should always be at the top of your list. As someone who’s been coaching and advising people for years, as well as getting coached myself, I’ve witnessed how fast some people can grow and improve with good coaching. Deciding to get coached means deciding to invest in yourself and your own growth. No coach is going to do the work for you, but a good one will help you spot areas where you are struggling, different paths forward, and help you fact challenges you might be shying away from.

I think we’re past the point where getting a coach or being recommended one by your boss means anything bad. Just the other week, I was approached by the CEO of a successful startup who mentioned getting coaches to his senior executives as part of expressing the company’s investment and belief in them.

Coaches don’t have to be external. In some organizations, you can find someone who’s experienced and available to work with you, especially if you ask for it. Your boss is the natural first choice. However, there’s no denying that in startups, sometimes these people are just not available or do not possess the experience. When that’s the case, looking for help outside the company is the right path.

Peer Work

Unlike coaching, relying on your peers is less about asking them to help you improve and more about working closely with people you trust. When working with groups of leaders, I always encourage them to learn to work together and leverage their peer groups for help. For example, if you have a peer director or VP, they might have already faced a similar scenario and can help you by sharing their lessons.

They don’t even have to be from the same background. In many of the better-run tech companies I see, the VP Engineering and VP Product work very closely together. Often, there’s enough mutual understanding to allow them to collaborate and consult one another. Look around and realize where these precious relationships exist near you.

Hiring

Somewhat of a tactical issue, but one that can eat up huge chunks of your time. Hiring and staffing positions is a very exhausting part of the job, even if you’re not aiming at hyper-growth. Further, it requires skills and experience that have almost nothing to do with the rest of the day-to-day work in leadership roles. I mean, how many people naturally get excited about picking up clues regarding struggling startups and then finding introductions to the senior engineers there to strike up a conversation?

If you find that hiring is taking too long or not resulting in the right types of candidates getting to your pipeline (or no candidates at all), why not get help? That’s what recruiters and recruiting agencies are for. Will it be more expensive? It might be, in the short term. But there’s also the matter of valuing your own time. Decide how much time you want to invest in hiring every week, and get help to ensure you don’t need to put in more than that.

Delegation

For many good managers, the instinct is to take things off their team’s plate, not add to it. So they find themselves doing the most boring tasks that come up as an effort to spare the team from context switches and being a “good abstraction layer.”

I’ve written about the perils of such an approach from the point of view of protecting your team. In our context today, it is also necessary to realize that the more you do that, the less you’ll be able to work on the higher-priority things around. Are you really doing anyone a favor if you keep taking care of the minute issues but at the cost of never operating strategically and letting the organization decline?

Further, delegation is not just about making things easier for you. Delegating provides a practice ground for letting your team members hone their skills and improve. Some leaders hide everything from their direct reports so that when those finally get promoted, they are flabbergasted by all the extra things they were never aware of. And then there are those leaders who let their people continuously glimpse and get tastes of the “next level.” Only the latter approach is effective in growing and coaching your people.

Injecting Expertise

Continuing with the notion of not having all the answers, there are different ways to address that. You can shrug and admit that you don’t know. You can cram all night and ask a bunch of people lots of questions. But you can also decide to bring in someone who’s an expert in the particular area where you require help and let them teach you and your people what you need to know.

Whenever I see another startup patting themselves on the shoulder for having learned how to set up Kubernetes from scratch or solved their Kafka layout, I cringe. There’s definitely value to learning things on our own, but there are also many areas where injecting that expertise could have saved you precious time. Again, this comes down to assessing whether you’d rather have short-term cash flow gains at the expense of delivering things at a slower rate or not.

Outsourcing

Similarly, sometimes you need more than merely some expertise injected. You need a whole project expedited. I know that it can be uncomfortable to imagine that parts of your startup—your baby—could be designed and implemented by “outsiders.” However, that’s part of growing up as a leader. Just as parents eventually bring into the loop other educators, the same happens with having someone else help you accelerate a project. Having had the opportunity to do a bunch of freelance coding for startups, I can attest firsthand that, at times, that could make all the difference between closing a big client or getting acquired and moving along slowly for years in zombie-mode.

Communities

Lastly, I want to stress the importance of getting help by belonging to different groups and circles and learning from peers who aren’t your colleagues. Every single person reading this can find some groups, meetups, and Slacks to join within minutes. These are great for getting exposure to what others are struggling with, finding more peers and coaches that you could rely on further in your career (or coaching others yourself!), and realizing how many of your struggles are shared.

I do believe that seeing others grapple with similar issues helps us. Also, in groups that are diverse enough, you will learn new ways of handling things. You don’t have to go it alone, and communities are the immediate solution.

Get help, get better. Life’s too short to do everything on your own.