You think you’re leading, but are you just leaning? Too many tech executives rely on crutches—rigid processes, feel-good metrics, office presence—to prop up their leadership. These habits make you feel in control but actually hold you back. Real leaders don’t hide behind structure or autopilot decisions—they make the hard calls, shape their organizations, and drive real impact. If you want to stop managing and start leading, it’s time to recognize the crutches slowing you down—and toss them aside.
😊 Team Happiness Crutch
This might be a basic assumption we disagree about, but a leader’s job isn’t to keep the team happy. So many leaders I work with have things mixed up, and this leads them to make the wrong decisions. This is a crutch because, ostensibly, it sounds like the right thing—no one wants an unhappy team, after all. It’s also easier in the short term. If you keep people pleased, you’ll have fewer conflicts, less stress, and less anger.
Now, I’m not saying your goal should be to make their lives miserable, but you’re not put into your role to make the team pleased. The company needs you and your organization to achieve certain goals, and when we prioritize the team too much, we get into situations where people don’t receive feedback, promotions and organizational changes are done just to appease people, and similar mistakes. Teams easily lose sight of what’s really important and start focusing on their perks. Sorry, I’d rather tell people the harsh truth, provide the needed feedback, and have an effective team, as opposed to a team happily following the path to failure or layoffs.
📜 The Tech Excellence Crutch
Another thing that’s easy for tech leaders to lean on is the purity of tech and decisions made, without explicitly stating it is mostly dogma. When teams provide certain estimates with the explanation that there’s a “right way” of doing things, they might feel good about themselves and their craft but also say that some invisible quality metric is more important than whatever the business needs to achieve. Again, it’s easy to lean on that as part of our professionalism, especially when many others in the company don’t have a technical background, but it doesn’t set you up for real success.
Rather than use that crutch, realize that the best option is to learn to speak about things in business terms. What is the ROI of the different options? Are you a CT-No (video) that always shoots everything down, seeing everything is a binary yes or no option? Or can you throw away that crutch and see the entire spectrum of possibilities for every task and goal?
🏢 The Return-to-Office Crutch
Right when Covid first hit, I ran workshops about one of the biggest leadership and management crutches we were used to: starting at people to measure performance, seriousness, motivation, and more. It’s a lot easier to manage by inputs, judging people for when they arrive at the office or leave, whereas management by outcomes requires leveling up as a leader.
I think that it’s clear that the vast majority of companies will have hybrid work from now on, at the least. With the progress of AI and changes in the industry, I believe teams will be smaller and more remote. That means leaders have to learn to work with goals and create autonomous teams, not hovering over their shoulders more with virtual tools.
📊 The DORA Crutch
Not to belittle the importance of metrics for effective management of any organization and especially product-engineering teams, but there’s a real issue when we turn these into our main KPIs. Reaching to these as a solution when your CEO wants some objectives for your organization is a crutch. The business doesn’t need your R&D metrics. You can have terrific metrics at face value yet provide little real business impact—or fail to maximize your team’s potential.
Engineering teams deserve to have real business objectives—shared with Product and perhaps others. R&D metrics are helpful, but internally. Marketing can focus internally on speedier experiments, but what matters is the impact on the pipeline. Sales can focus on better scripts for calls, but the CEO cares about closing rates. The same goes for engineering.
🏭 The Feature Factory Crutch
Shipping more features and closing more tickets feels productive—until you realize you’re just running on a treadmill. If your team regularly delivers 100% of the roadmap or close to that, I’d bet it’s more likely that you’re being too conservative and buffering like crazy, not remarkably productive. When we just want to check boxes and move tickets to the “done” column, we can rush into implementation too eagerly.
Real leaders focus on outcomes, not just output. Instead of asking, “Did we deliver?” start asking, “Did we make a difference?” A team that delivers a hundred features no one needs is just burning cash with extra steps. Instead of having prescriptive goals for your organization, like a shopping list of features, give them business goals to work towards with the flexibility of finding the right path there.
⏳ The “Engineering Time” Crutch
Blocking off fixed “engineering time” as sacred is a pet peeve of mine and one of the least-recognized crutches. You set a number—10%, 15%, 20%, or more!—and go to town. Refactorings, rewrites, endless tech debt, what not. It’s so easy and comfortable: the team seems busy, pleased, and focused on tech excellence. This is the crutch sitting atop a lot of other crutches.
You have to learn to make the case for the different tasks and why the company is better off tackling that specific tech debt as opposed to doing something else. Does that require more effort to communicate with your Product peers? You bet it. It’s still the only right way to do it. See more here.
🕊️ The Tech Pigeonholing Crutch
Thinking, “I’m the CTO, my job is tech, not business” is like a chef refusing to care about the restaurant’s menu, neighborhood, and food cost. Tech is not an isolated function—it’s a competitive advantage. If you’re not in the room shaping strategy, you’re just a highly paid engineer. Step up and speak the language of the business. You’re not a real CTO until you make this change.