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Leadership: Advice
- Accept What Is Outside Your Control — Spend your energy on what you can change. Let go of what you can't.
- Aim to Do Nothing by Yourself — Your job as a leader is to make yourself unnecessary.
- Amplify Good Patterns — Notice what's working and make more of it.
- As a Leader Your Commitment Influences Others — People watch what you do more than what you say.
- Balance Consult-and-Decide and Build-Consensus — Two decision-making approaches. Use both, but know when to use which.
- Balancing Engineering Values — Engineering teams often hold values in tension. The leader's job is to balance them.
- Be the Agent of Change — Don't wait for someone else to fix things. That's your job.
- Bias for Action — When in doubt, do something. Inaction is a choice too, and usually the worse one.
- Company Becomes People It Hires — Every hire shapes the company's future culture, capability, and direction.
- Constantly Review Incentive Structures — People optimise for what's measured and rewarded. Make sure you're rewarding the right things.
- Eliminate Organisational Debt — Just like technical debt, organisations accumulate structural problems that slow everything down.
- Enjoy Running the Company — The day-to-day work of leadership is the job. Not just the vision.
- Explaining Anything Helps to Understand It Better — Teaching is the most underrated learning strategy.
- Focus on Things Only You Can Do — Delegate everything that someone else can do. Spend your time on what only you can do.
- Governance by Coding — Embed governance into the systems themselves, not into documents or meetings.
- Growth Must Be Sustainable — Fast growth that breaks things isn't growth. It's a time bomb.
- Have Only One High-Level Strategy — If you have three strategies, you have none.
- Hire Slow Fire Fast — Take your time hiring. Don't delay when it's not working.
- Hire Those Who Know Better Than You — Your job is to build a team that's collectively smarter than you.
- In Order to Get You Need to Give — Reciprocity is the foundation of relationships and influence.
- Keep Questioning What You Believe — Certainty is a stopping point. Treat every belief as a draft you can still improve.
- Loyalty Can Be Won But Not Bought — Money retains people. Loyalty is what makes them stay when things get hard.
- Make People Responsible for Results — Ownership drives quality. Shared responsibility means no responsibility.
- People Product Profit — In that order.
- Profit Cannot Be the Purpose — Profit is oxygen, not the reason to breathe.
- Radical Transparency — Share more than feels comfortable. It's almost always better than the alternative.
- Recruit Leaders Not Followers — Hire people who will lead, not just execute.
- Remote-First Is About Not Simulating Office Work — Remote work done right is a different way of working, not office work over video.
- Remove All Unnecessary Meetings — Most meetings shouldn't exist. Cut them, and protect what's left.
- Reward Well Those Who Serve Well — Recognise and compensate the people who deliver. Don't take reliability for granted.
- Seek Advice from Those Who Disagree — The most valuable feedback comes from people who will tell you you're wrong.
- Set Clear Goals — Unclear goals produce unclear results.
- Start the Battle After Creating Victory Conditions — Preparation is what separates success from luck.
- Teach Through Assigning Actual Tasks — People learn by doing, not by watching presentations.
- Team as Sports Team Not Family — A sports team is a better metaphor than a family for how engineering teams should work.
- Trust Is at the Core of Leadership — Without trust, nothing else works.
- Underpromise and Overdeliver — Promise less, deliver more. That's how trust compounds.
- Visualisation Makes the Group Smarter — Making things visible helps teams think together.
Other Leadership types: Concepts · Dualities · Principles · Tools
Advice in other domains: Product