Category: Leadership

There’s a point in an organization’s growth where the problems stop being local.

What used to feel like a workflow tweak reveals a deeper data inconsistency. A platform improvement surfaces unclear ownership. A tooling decision exposes assumptions that were never fully examined. The issues don’t live neatly inside a single backlog anymore; they stretch across teams, incentives, and timelines.

At some point, you stop seeing tasks. You start seeing the system.

And once you see the system, everything begins to feel connected.

That’s when it gets interesting. And where, for me, growth began.

As a senior engineer, my instinct was straightforward

If something could be improved, improve it.

If I noticed a fragility, I hardened it. If I saw a misalignment, I named it and helped correct it. If I could trace a downstream consequence, I surfaced it early so we could avoid unnecessary pain later.

That instinct served me well. It’s how you build trust. It’s how you raise the bar. It’s how you grow into senior.

But the shift into staff dev and higher requires a different muscle.

Because at that level, the problems you can see are rarely confined to your lane. They span domains. They reveal capability gaps rather than implementation gaps. And they multiply the more context you gain.

The question changes from “Can I fix this?” to “Should I own this?”

That’s a learned lesson, by the way; not just theory.

When clarity creates gravity

One of the less discussed aspects of staff+ work is that clarity has gravity.

When you can connect dots across domains, people naturally pull you into conversations. You have the context. You understand the tradeoffs or can figure them out very quickly. You can anticipate second- and third-order effects that aren’t yet obvious.

Over time, you become an informal integration point.

And that can feel like growth. And at first it is. Influence expands. The room relies on your perspective, you’re trusted with ambiguity.

But there’s a subtle edge to it.

If you equate understanding with obligation, you begin to absorb responsibility for everything you can see. The more interconnected the system becomes, the more you feel compelled to stabilize it personally.

Over time, that pattern reduces leverage instead of increasing it.

There’s also a social layer to this that I didn’t fully appreciate at first. Many women, and others who’ve been socialized to be the reliable one in the room, are conditioned to equate usefulness with value, to step in, smooth things over, and keep everything moving.

But reliability and strategic growth are not the same thing. Being the stabilizer can make you indispensable at your current level. It doesn’t automatically position you to reshape the system itself. And without realizing it, you can start optimizing for being needed rather than being leveraged.

Not everyone cares about that. I do.

Interconnected doesn’t mean centralized

At scale, everything touches everything. Architecture influences process; process shapes ownership; ownership affects incentives. The system is inherently interconnected.

It’s tempting to respond to that by centralizing coherence through one person or one team. If you can see how the pieces fit, maybe you should coordinate them all.

But interconnected doesn’t mean centralized ownership.

In fact, centralizing too much through one person or team can unintentionally slow down the very maturity you’re trying to cultivate. You become the glue that compensates for structural gaps instead of designing structures that remove the need for glue.

There’s a career dimension to this that took me time to understand. Organizations tend to elevate people who redesign systems, not just the ones who keep them running. If you’re constantly compensating for structural gaps yourself, those gaps remain invisible, and so does the need to expand the mandate around the work.

There’s a difference between being helpful and being high-leverage.

The former stabilizes. The latter transforms¹.

Foresight and restraint

There’s also something uncomfortable about foresight. When you can see where something is likely to fracture months from now, it’s hard to watch it move forward imperfectly. Sometimes it makes me literally wince. It feels negligent to stay quiet when you can anticipate the cost.

Earlier in my career, I interpreted that discomfort as a cue to step in.

Now I’m realizing that instinct doesn’t scale.

I think that part of operating at staff+ isn’t expanding the number of things you personally own, but refining the ones you choose to transform. It’s naming risks without absorbing delivery. It’s designing clean interfaces rather than patching every adjacent seam. It’s making the implications visible and then allowing the organization to decide how much it wants to invest in closing the gap.

That feels less immediately satisfying. But it’s also a lot more scalable and more directly in service of cultivating and maturing a system.

The goal isn’t to do less. It’s to do the work that makes the other work resolvable.

Choosing the hill

When multiple capability gaps are visible at once, the discipline isn’t in addressing all of them. It’s in choosing the one that, if transformed deeply, will change how the others are approached.

The right transformation raises the baseline. It shifts mental models. It clarifies ownership. It makes future decisions less fragile. It might look like designing the interface three teams were previously working around, or naming the ownership gap that was quietly slowing every initiative. It’s not less work. It’s more precise work, the kind that compounds.

The goal isn’t to reduce scope. It’s to increase leverage. To focus on the change that makes other changes easier, faster, and more durable.

When that work is done well, adjacent systems don’t get ignored. They become easier to evolve because the foundation is clearer, the interfaces are cleaner, and the ownership model is stronger.

Seeing the whole system still matters. But the real impact comes from reshaping it, not personally carrying it.

1. This is a nod to Zone to Win by Geoffrey Moore, who articulated 4 zones an org can operate in: performance zone, productivity zone, incubation zone, and transformation zone. Here’s a brief-ish summary of the book. ↩︎

People often admire decisive meetings.

The kind where someone frames the problem clearly, tension surfaces, perspectives clash a little, and a strong direction emerges by the end. It feels productive. Strategic. Powerful.

I admire those meetings too. I like clarity. I like direction. I am not short on opinions, and I’m comfortable steering a conversation when it needs steering. I care about outcomes. I care about momentum. I care about not wasting time.

But I’ve started to notice something.

By the time a hard conversation goes well, the real work has usually already happened.

The work that happens before the meeting

Before the meeting, there have often been one-on-one conversations. Sometimes directly about the issue at hand. Sometimes indirectly, reinforcing something more foundational: that a person’s perspective matters, that disagreement is welcome, that raising a concern won’t quietly cost them later.

That groundwork rarely shows up in the calendar invite.

And yet it shapes everything.

In the meeting itself, I usually arrive with a point of view. I’ve done the thinking. I have a thesis. I can articulate a direction. That part comes naturally to me.

What doesn’t come as naturally, and what I’ve had to learn (and still learning), is holding that thesis lightly enough that it can change.

If I walk into the room with an answer that’s already locked in, then I don’t actually want collaboration. I want endorsement.

The best answers I’ve seen don’t come from endorsement. They come from integration. They absorb perspectives I couldn’t have generated alone. They are refined through friction. They are stronger because they’ve been shaped in public.

But that only works if the room feels safe.

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the foundational dysfunction isn’t conflict. It’s absence of trust. Without trust, teams avoid real disagreement. Without real disagreement, they commit artificially. And when commitment is artificial, accountability and results suffer.

You can’t shortcut that first layer.

Psychological safety isn’t something you declare. It’s something you build.

The discipline of not rushing

And building it requires discipline.

I resist speed, even though moving fast can look decisive.

I resist over-controlling the narrative, even though I’m capable of doing so.

I resist the urge to appear fully formed and perfectly prepared.

There’s a saying often attributed to the U.S. Navy SEALs: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It is one of my favourite sayings.

It’s not a slogan about taking your time. It’s about precision under pressure. Move deliberately enough to avoid chaos. Be smooth enough that execution accelerates naturally.

I’ve seen the same principle play out in teams. When we slow down enough to surface real dissent, to let silence breathe, to allow an idea to be challenged before it calcifies, the decision becomes smoother. And when the decision is smoother, execution moves faster.

I try to let silence stretch longer than is comfortable. I try not to rush in to rescue the room. Often, that pause is where courage gathers. It’s where someone decides to disagree or to say the risky thing. Or to suggest something more ambitious than they would have otherwise.

This kind of work is sometimes described as glue work. The relational labor. The context-setting. The trust-building. The one-on-ones. The steady reinforcement that each voice matters. Historically, women have often carried more of that work in organizations.

But I don’t see it as auxiliary. I see it as structural.

Bold direction without trust is brittle.

Speed without safety narrows the range of ideas in the room.

Control without space produces compliance, not commitment.

What success actually looks like

For me, success isn’t walking out of the room having been right. It isn’t hearing my original thesis echoed back to me.

Success is when the decision no longer feels like mine.

It’s when there is real buy-in because the idea was shaped together. When people can see their fingerprints on the outcome. When constructive dissent made the answer better. When commitment is strong because ownership is shared.

That kind of buy-in doesn’t happen accidentally. It’s the result of work that most people never see.

When speed is necessary

That said, not every moment allows for that kind of integration.

Sometimes we do need to move fast. Sometimes the call has to be made. Sometimes the room doesn’t have time for full debate. In those moments, I am decisive.

But when a team operates in a psychologically safe environment, those moments land differently. There is trust and context. There is an understanding that if space wasn’t held this time, there is a reason.

Speed is accepted because it isn’t the norm. Authority works because it isn’t overused.

The foundation holds.

Building something that lasts

There is power in setting direction. I do that often.

But there is also power in building the conditions where a team can challenge, refine, and ultimately co-own that direction.

When that happens, the decision holds.

Why? Because it was built not dictated.