Leading is doing

I’m inspired here by Camilla Montonen’s skeet:

The longer I am in this industry, the more I realise that there is leadership in title or name and then actual get shit done leadership. If you see a failing test or a codebase that needs linting and you fix it, that’s leadership.

When I started working as an engineer, a lot of my work came from managers: build this feature, fix that bug. You might think it was because, as a new engineer, I needed lots of help, and that was true. But it was also because I didn’t know anything about the company I was a part of–I didn’t know what we were building, or why it was built that way.

As I grew more capable and experienced, I also started to understand what we were building and why were building it. That is: I started to understand how our work furthered our company’s goals. And that is when I began to see gaps in what we needed, problems with our existing products, and bugs and annoyances that were impeding our progress.

And that was when I realized I had a valuable perspective on what we were doing as an engineering team. I started to see how I would solve those problems, and as I discussed them with my teammates, I learned that many of them didn’t know the problems existed, or didn’t realize that solving them was a thing we could do.

So if you want to know why good engineers get paid lots of money, at bottom it’s not because they have strong engineering skills. It’s because they know how to use their skills to effectively further the goals of the company.

OK, but what does any of this have to do with leadership?

Effective leadership is mostly just seeing what needs doing and ensuring it gets done. If you’re in a management role, that involves coordination and managing people; but it’s no less leadership if it’s fixing a test, linting a codebase, or making a painful manual task automated.

See a thing that needs doing, then within the scope of your power and authority, get it done. That’s leadership.