A Leader's Job is to Push

One of the most common reasons new leaders struggle is they continue to use their strong IC skillset instead of developing their leadership skillset.

As an engineer (or any IC; “doer”), doing the work and being helpful is what’s rewarded. You solve problems, reduce friction, unblock work, and generally make life easier for the people around you. The more senior you become, the more your reputation becomes tied to your ability to absorb complexity and carry difficult things.

Leadership may look similar on the surface, but trying to approach it the same way is a great way to speedrun burnout.

A leader who spends all their time absorbing problems eventually becomes an annoying bottleneck. A leader who quietly carries the consequences of others’ decisions (or often indecision) eventually burns themselves out. A leader who prioritises harmony over clarity often discovers that they have created a pleasant environment in which nothing actually happens.

At some point, every new lead must confront an often deeply uncomfortable truth: a significant part of the job is, actually, making other people uncomfortable.

Organisations naturally drift towards conflict avoidance. Conflict is painful and messy, and pain and mess gets surfaced as problems, and these problems are often “solved” by division. Often, instead of seeing conflict as a natural and healthy part of doing big, hard things, leaders see gears in their machine grinding and decide to separate them. The wheels are less squeaky, but the dysfunction remains.

Difficult decisions get deferred. Ambiguous ownership remains ambiguous. Risks that should be confronted are instead tolerated. People learn that if they wait long enough, someone else will make the call for them.

A leader’s job is to push against that tendency.

Resistance Is Utile

Many new leaders interpret resistance as feedback - especially when it comes from “above”. Someone becomes defensive in a meeting, a stakeholder pushes back, a manager expresses frustration, a senior engineer doesn’t like being challenged to explain their decisions.

Often our instinctive conclusion is that we’ve done something wrong. Perhaps we handled the conversation poorly, or perhaps our concern was not valid, or perhaps the push itself was inappropriate.

Sometimes that’s true. But often it isn’t. More often than a freshly minted leader usually expects.

Resistance is inevitable when you push people out of comfortable patterns. If someone has become accustomed to deferring decisions, they will not enjoy being asked to make one. If someone has become accustomed to operating without accountability, they will not enjoy being asked for solid commitments. If a team has been avoiding an awkward trade-off for months or years, they will not enjoy being forced to confront it.

Just like in your own personal growth journey, discomfort is often a good thing. But when you’re leading, it’s not so clear cut. All discomfort tells you is where your pressure is being felt - like a doctor poking a patient, all the discomfort of your patient tells you is where it hurts, not the nature of the injury.

The skill of the doctor, or leader, is in how they interpret, diagnose and treat that discomfort. And in how hard they poke.

Pushing Is Not Shoving

Many new leaders also over correct on “being the boss” (I did!). The new skillset is underdeveloped and lacks nuance, and so they confuse pressure with aggression, directness with rudeness or hostility, and accountability with dominance.

If you are or have a leader like this, recognise this for what it is - in most people it is an underdeveloped skillset. In some people it’s a power trip. But for most, it’s just underskill.

Beyond the willingness to make people uncomfortable when necessary, you need to understand why those people are uncomfortable, and why you are doing it.

Are they uncomfortable because you’re exposing something difficult that’s otherwise being ignored? Are they uncomfortable because you’re forcing clarity where ambiguity was previously convenient? Are they uncomfortable because a difficult decision can no longer be postponed?

Or are they uncomfortable because you’ve misunderstood the situation? Or because your message is inconsistent, your standards are impossible, or you’ve applied pressure in a way that isn’t productive? A common one from underskilled leaders is misinterpreting their own failings (poor strategy, organisation, communication, unclear expectations, etc.) as the team not working hard enough.

Good leaders don’t seek discomfort for its own sake, they apply it as a means to an end. An end that considers everyone - themselves, their staff, their team, and the organisation. They learn to distinguish between discomfort that encourages progress and discomfort that signals dysfunction.

Pushing Up And Around

Many new leaders have an instinct to absorb organisational failures rather than expose them. This often comes from a place of goodness - everyone has an instinct to “protect” their teams from executive dysfunction, and nobody (normal) relishes the idea of watching others fail under stress.

But this misplaced benevolence almost always backfires - either your team decides you are the problem (instead of the structure above or around you), or you suffer the entire emotional burden yourself. In effect, what we often think of as us protecting the team, is actually us protecting our boss or our peers.

Think to a time when a decision was required but never arrives; feedback was requested but never given; or given but rejected or ignored. A time when an approval sat untouched for weeks; an external team missed a commitment; a higher level leader holds subordinates responsible for the consequences of their own decisions; a random pivot appears out of the blue with no context, and no number to call for more information.

Typically, we try to quietly work around the problem. We delay or rearrange work, we take on extra effort ourselves to finish something, we spend overtime building contingency plans or thinking through the consequences of ideas from people who haven’t taken the time to think or explain themselves. We attempt to shield our teams from this, and we tell ourselves this is just the nature of the work.

What we’re actually doing is hiding failure. The organisation above or around never experiences the cost of their behaviour, and so that behaviour continues. The person creating the blockage learns nothing because somebody else is carrying the consequences. The problem becomes invisible.

Good leaders cannot afford to do this.

For example, if somebody else’s indecision is preventing progress, the correct response is not to silently absorb the impact. The correct response is to make the impact visible:

• the decision was required by this date
• no response was received
• we are proceeding with the best information available

The goal isn’t to punish anyone, it’s to enlighten them. You are escalating the information. An organisation cannot fix problems it cannot see.

If things continue without complaint, great! Problem solved. If the lax decision maker kicks up a stink, well, their name’s on the receipt. Whether the behaviour changes or a pattern emerges, either way it’s been made visible.

The key idea is to find ways for you and your team to proceed without accepting the cost of external dysfunction. Don’t allow work to grind to a halt because somebody else isn’t doing their job - and don’t (blindly) cover for that person, either.

A surprising amount of organisational effectiveness comes down to simply refusing to let one person’s failure become everyone else’s problem. Even when you like someone - especially when you like them - you need to make sure they’re doing their job effectively and that others aren’t left picking up after them. Just one person in the wrong position can bring down the whole team.

Leaders Create Discomfort

Many people imagine leadership as a position of power or control, where authority allows you to direct people as you wish. I can almost guarantee you that if you behave that way, you’ll want to be real certain you’re good at delivering results, because it’s the only chance you’ll have at staying there.

In reality, leadership is more like “pressure management”. Organisations naturally accumulate uncertainty, ambiguity, indecision and avoidance - if ignored these things compound over time, slowing projects, diffusing accountability, killing momentum, and eventually burning out even the best staff.

A leader’s job is to apply pressure where pressure is needed: to force decisions; to create clarity; to expose problems; to make accountability visible. A leader’s job is to introduce discomfort in the places where the organisation is avoiding reality.

That won’t always make you popular - sometimes people will resent it. Sometimes they’ll push back. Sometimes they’ll decide you’re the problem rather than the person exposing it. That’s fine.

The goal of leadership is not to eliminate discomfort.

The goal is to ensure that the right people feel the right discomfort at the right time, so that the organisation can keep moving forward.