Help Your Team Succeed: Empower, Trust, and Serve

Good engineering leadership is all about helping others do well. This is especially important for startups, where teams are usually small and there are many unknowns.

Trust and Delegation

Great engineering leaders delegate tasks even when things might not turn out perfectly. They choose trust over control, understanding that micromanaging can hurt confidence. Just like helping a student too much with their homework stops them from learning how to check their own work, leaders should let their teams try things, mess up, and learn from it.

At previous companies, I used an approach that got rid of the usual checks between engineers and the final code. The idea was simple: If you think your work is ready, it goes straight to being used. This "no-brakes" strategy helped the engineers feel more responsible for their work, which led to better quality code.

Making Time for Availability

Great leaders make time to be there, even for things that might seem small. A leader who's too busy to spend time with their team probably isn't managing their own time well, rather than having too much work from the organization. If leaders run things efficiently and delegate tasks well, they should have enough time to be there when their team needs them.

As a startup leader, you should aim to:

• Take the blame and let your team have the credit.
• Be there when there's a crisis.
• Work to give your team the best opportunities they've ever had.

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