Empower your developers

The best investment you can make if you have just been promoted to manager is picking up “The Making of a Manager” by Julie Zhuo. That book scarily highlights a mistake I went through (forcing myself to continue individual contributor work long past the point of sustainability).

For awhile, as with many new managers, I was focused on ‘doing’; thinking that by taking on the extra load myself I was protecting my team from burnout. I believed that quietly doing the work was the best way to handle the fact that there was more work than the team could manage.

But the truth is, there is a huge gap in this mindset. A manager who says, “I’ll handle this task myself to save the team time” falls short of the manager who did a one-to-one and realizes that the majority of their developers actually can and want to do more.

Looking back, my actions have unintentionally caused my team to question why the work wasn’t passed to them and, ultimately, to question the trust I had in them.

Recognizing this I had move away from execution and start focusing on selling the vision, ensuring the team realized that the work they were about to do really mattered. This shift involves purposefully mixing the team to build healthier communication with each other, inventing traditions that the team subconsciously adopted as their own (yay!), and most importantly empowering them to manage the execution based on the shared goal themself.

So as a reflection and reminder to myself for 2026 is to stop hoarding the work and continue to empower the team and focus on their growth instead. Be a better leader that the team deserved to have.