You have so many things on your plate. There’s probably always something you know you’re not getting to. Some tech execs I see put out fires so often, I tease them with the Fireman Sam theme song. You might be even good at all those things. Yet that’s not doing leadership work, that’s just being busy. If you want to upgrade yourself and become an impactful leader, you need to prioritize the hard stuff, not just the urgent fires.
Forgetting the Work
When you are regularly overwhelmed and rushing, you are spending time pushing things forward at the lowest altitude possible. This is work that rarely makes things better and induces growth, but merely unblocks whatever short-term objective you’re looking at right now. Many of my sessions with clients would be consumed entirely by discussing these little quotidian crises unless I interjected.
You probably “logically know” that your role should be about more than that. That you need to do the work that requires more depth. Where should your team be headed? What should change? What opportunities are there? If you never step off the treadmill, you’ll never regain your breath and do that part of your role.
Reading articles like this one doesn’t really count if it isn’t translated into action. So no matter how many podcasts you listen to while doing the dishes, or how many audiobooks you crunch, the only thing that will move the needle is you making a deliberate effort to do the work.
Suggested Checklist
Finding more time isn’t in the scope of this article, and you might want to consider doing a calendar reset. However, putting excuses aside, here are some suggestions for things you should place on your calendar first, before letting the other things suck up all of your time.
- Leadership blocks: plainly, making the time to lead. These can be the platform for most of the things mentioned here. Full video explanation is here.
- Feedback: One of the most impactful tools for any leader to coach and grow the team. Without thoughtful and consistent feedback, teams can stall for months and even years. At the very least, have regular 1:1s with everyone directly reporting to you—and come to those sessions well-prepared. Grab the free impact coaching framework ebook for more.
- Retrospect: Similar to feedback, but for yourself and the organization as a whole. Review how things are operating, check metrics, and check your previous journal entries to see how your past assumptions and plans actually panned out.
- Moving upstream: Your responsibility as a senior tech leader is not just to take care of the daily delivery of the team, but to be a genuine executive in the company. That requires maintaining enough context about what’s happening in the business and the industry as a whole. It might require elbowing your way to meetings. Ensure your VPE/CTO title isn’t just a vanity one. Move upstream.