You simply cannot brute-force your teams to quality. Negative reinforcement and repetitive corrections rarely result in improved behavior. More often, this approach stifles innovation, creates a culture of fear, and encourages the bare minimum effort required to avoid penalties.
This pattern frequently emerges when a highly successful senior individual contributor (IC) is promoted into their first leadership role. Their past success came from their personal execution, their specific work habits, and their deep technical skill. The temptation is strong to simply impose these same habits onto their new team through rules and mandates.
The IC Mindset vs. The Leader Mindset
Transitioning from a senior contributor to a leadership role requires a deeper effort than simply making rules to duplicate your own work habits. What got you here (personal execution) won't get you there (leading a successful team).
Trying to micromanage your team to follow your exact methods fails because:
- It Doesn't Scale: You cannot personally review every line of code or dictate every technical decision for a growing team.
- It Disempowers: It tells your team that you don't trust their judgment or creativity, leading to disengagement.
- It Creates Bottlenecks: You become the single point of failure for every decision.
- It Stifles Innovation: It closes the door to the possibility that someone on your team might find a better way than you did.
Becoming a Force Multiplier
Moving into a leadership role means shifting your focus from being the best builder to becoming a force multiplier. Your success is no longer measured by your individual output, but by the collective output and growth of your team. This requires a completely different skillset:
- Building Systems: Instead of enforcing personal habits, create systems that enable success. This means clear documentation, robust automated testing, effective code review processes, and well-defined metrics that measure outcomes, not just activity.
- Measuring Real Results: Focus on the impact the team is delivering (e.g., improved system reliability, faster cycle time, positive user feedback), not on vanity metrics (like lines of code or tickets closed).
- Recognizing and Rewarding Innovation: Actively look for and encourage new approaches that accelerate results. Celebrate team members who find a more efficient way to solve a problem, even if it's not the way you would have done it.
This requires humility. It means admitting that even though your methods got you this far, there are still ways to do things better. It means not just being open to those possibilities, but actively seeking them out, recognizing them early, and championing them within the team.
Your job is no longer to have all the answers, but to build a system where the best answers can emerge and thrive. That is the essence of effective engineering leadership.