Shift from a Leader-Follower to a Leader-Leader Approach
Summary
The article argues for a leadership shift from leader-follower to leader-leader in engineering, emphasizing empowering teams, reducing micromanagement, and treating technical competence as a capability that must be complemented by organizational clarity. It draws on Turn The Ship Around and Google's Project Oxygen to show how intent-driven leadership and coaching unlock faster, more reliable delivery. It provides practical steps such as banning 'Can I...' in technical talks, using 'I intend to...' language, establishing guardrails, ADRs, and blameless postmortems to foster continuous learning and autonomy.