Protecting your time and going dark are different things, and your team can tell which is happening even when you think they can’t. Setting boundaries around evenings and weekends, not being the person who answers Slack messages at midnight — all of that is healthy and sustainable. What I’m talking about is something different: a pattern I’ve observed in leaders who go dark in a way that creates anxiety for their team, not peace for themselves. ...
The career conversation that most managers have sounds something like this: a direct report doesn’t get the promotion they expected, or they get it but felt the process was opaque, or they come in and say they’ve accepted a role somewhere else. And then the manager has a very intense, very real conversation about what that person actually wants from their career, what they see as their next step, whether there’s something that could have been done differently. ...
The hardest part of a performance conversation isn’t the conversation. It’s the six weeks before it, when you know you need to have it and keep finding reasons not to. Someone in your reporting chain is not performing — not dramatically, not in a way that’s creating a crisis yet, but in a way that you can see and that people around them are starting to notice. Their direct reports, their peer managers, the cross-functional partners they work with. Every week you don’t address it is a week the broader team watches you not address it, which is its own signal about what gets tolerated. ...
There’s a leadership skill nobody teaches you directly: what to do when you genuinely disagree with your manager’s call and the call still has to be made. I’ve been on both sides of this enough times that I have a fairly worked-out view of how to handle it. But I also remember the period before I had a worked-out view — before then, I defaulted to one of two bad instincts depending on the situation: either folding too early to avoid friction, or staying dug in past the point where it was useful. Neither serves the work. ...
About two years ago, someone left one of the engineering teams in my org whose contribution I didn’t have full visibility into until after they were gone. Not dramatically underappreciated — they were well-compensated, well-reviewed, treated respectfully. But I hadn’t fully seen what they were doing, and when they left, the teams they’d been quietly supporting revealed the size of the gap in the way that only becomes fully legible in retrospect. ...
If you’re doing the job well, your team will vent to you. They’ll tell you about the project that’s frustrating them, the colleague who’s driving them up the wall, the process that feels pointless, the decision that came down from leadership and doesn’t make any sense. They’ll bring you anxiety about their career trajectory, frustration about not getting a promotion, worry about whether the team’s work is valued. And they should be able to do this — because a manager who can’t receive this is a manager their team will learn not to trust. ...
I’ve spent a significant part of my career as an Amazon Bar Raiser — conducting well over two hundred interviews across my own organisation and teams throughout Amazon. Somewhere along the way I stopped paying much attention to the things that most interview scorecards are designed to evaluate. Not because they’re irrelevant — behavioural anchors and competency frameworks serve a real purpose — but because I’ve found they’re much better at identifying people who are good at interviewing than people who are good at leading. ...