Calm in the Storm: Leading Without Big Waves

I almost took the turn into sales in my first jobby-job. It was the obvious fork in the food chain: switch departments and learn influencing people, or stay in engineering and try to lead people who were, in some cases, twice my age. I felt too young for the second path and not ready for the first. The discomfort was real. Line management didn’t feel like a promotion so much as an X-ray. You discover your posture when other people start taking cues from it. It took time to feel at ease being accountable for work I didn’t personally type, and longer still to be comfortable giving direction to colleagues who had been shipping software since I was learning to compile it.

What helped was an excellent mentor. The first habit was listening until the room exhaled, staying with the fears and the messy constraints long enough that people believed I’d actually heard them. You have to stay silent and count to 10, my mentor used to tell me. Empathy wasn’t a new muscle for me, but it felt new in that environment. The organisation was male-heavy in leadership despite genuine attempts to improve it and emotional fluency often arrived disguised as “soft skills”. Calling them soft undersells how hard they are to practice. Noticing what isn’t being said, leaving your own cleverness on the table, resisting the urge to solve when someone needs you to understand. It turned out that a little of that went a long way, especially with younger developers who had never seen it modelled. Around the same time my mentor handed me a simple frame for having harder conversations: care personally, challenge directly. If you only care, you risk a kind of kindness that lets problems harden in silence. If you only challenge, you can win the point and lose the person. The work is to hold both at once. Make it unmistakable that someone matters, then be specific about the behaviour or decision that needs to change. We used it between leads when the stakes were political and with engineers when the stakes were practical. With time the rhythm becomes familiar, here is what I see, here is the impact, here is the standard we agreed, here is what good looks like next. No theatre, no euphemisms, no surprise.

Strong teams don’t form around the leader who’s always right; they form around a leader who makes it safe to be wrong in front of them. Insecure leaders recruit agreement and end up with nodding heads that hide blind spots. Secure leaders recruit curiosity and get raised hands. Creating the space where even the most quiet person feels safe to speak up. That’s where the good ideas live, not because dissent is fashionable, but because it is diagnostic. When a team knows they can challenge you without paying a social tax, they will surface the thing that would have broken otherwise. Trust deepens. Ideas move more freely. The work gets better because reality wins sooner.

The paradox is that being challengeable requires more spine, not less. It means inviting the question you don’t yet have an answer for and resisting the urge to perform one. It means changing your mind in public when the evidence moves, and letting the team see you do it without drama. It means drawing boundaries, clear expectations, clear priorities, clear definitions of done, so bravery has rails and disagreement resolves into decisions. On my better days I tried to model that by bringing half-finished thinking to the team and asking them to sharpen it. On my best days I thanked the person who made my idea smaller, simpler or slower because it made the system safer.

Over time the culture compounds. People stop optimising for pleasing the boss and start optimising for making the product work. One-on-ones become less like status reports and more like joint navigation. Feedback moves earlier in the cycle where it’s cheap. The engineers who used to wait for direction begin to offer it, the seniors who used to hoard context begin to write it down. If I learned anything, it’s that leadership isn’t about having the last word, it’s about making sure the right words can be said.