For years, I believed I could handle every engineering challenge on my own. I was wrong.
What I was actually doing was turning myself into a single-person dependency. Teams don’t grow around that. Nothing durable gets built that way. And burnout arrives on a schedule.
The work of leading isn’t the work I used to do. It’s building the infrastructure that lets the team do the work without me in the middle of it. Documented processes. Clear ownership. A forum for decisions that doesn’t need my approval every time.
The goal is a department that runs when I’m not in the room. That’s the only way results stay consistent across more than one quarter.