Leadership — The Myths and the Pain of Becoming a Leader

The myths that keep you from becoming a leader

Before you actually become a leader, certain beliefs will keep you outside the door.

Myth one: it isn’t my place, so it isn’t my business

Plenty of people hold the “not my seat, not my business” attitude — only someone with the leader title has any standing to get involved. The problem is that people who hold that belief, once they do become a leader, tend to treat themselves as the most important person on the team — as though it stops turning without them.

A good leader understands something else: a team is a system, built out of modules that collaborate. Every member handles their own tasks independently, and the team keeps running even without the leader. Casting yourself as the indispensable brain is its own kind of fixation.

Leadership doesn’t start when the title arrives. It’s being able to push something forward as if it were yours, before anyone has put a title on you.

Myth two: I’m not leader material

The other common piece of self-limiting is “I’m not leader material”. But everyone has something worth having, and everyone can exercise leadership in the right situation.

Charisma and the ability to inspire are only one shape it takes. Someone who isn’t good at inspiring can still move the team a step forward through new thinking and bringing in new technology. Leadership was never a gift a few people are born with — it’s an ability that gets needed, and used, when the situation calls for it.

The pain of becoming a tech leader

Once you’re past the myths and actually in the role, a very concrete pain shows up first.

Your technical ability will decline, and that’s inevitable

Time is finite. Move part of the hours you used to spend entirely on technology over to management, and your technical depth declining is close to inevitable. Technology keeps moving; not keeping up is falling behind.

But it isn’t a pure loss — what you get in exchange is growth on the other side: management ability improves, whether that’s expressing yourself and communicating, leading people, or seeing problems at the system level. The value of a tech leader was always going to shift from “how well I write it” to “how good the whole team’s output is”.

Reflection

Mindset

You run into the same kind of person everywhere: the one holding “not my business, not doing it”. A building security guard who won’t help the cleaner from the same company carry something small — and with the headcount they have, the cleaner’s load becomes brutal.

Plenty of things cost you almost nothing and mean a lot to someone else — and that “give them a hand while you’re at it” is itself a form of leadership. I’ve always gone with “help if you can”; sometimes I do end up carrying more, but leadership grows out of it without you noticing: with no title at all, what you say starts to carry weight, and things start moving because of it.

Technical ability

This era may have changed the calculus, though. Split technical ability roughly in two — theory and practice. Since AI arrived, the cost of learning theory has dropped enormously, and a large part of practice has shifted to “building with AI”.

Put together: yes, your hands-on ability declines after you become a leader — but if you build with AI instead, you end up not much worse off than before. The theory side can be topped up the same way, which patches the old weakness of falling behind the times. Compared with the past, the pain of becoming a leader today should be very much smaller.