There is a particular kind of executive confidence that appears in technology organisations, and it usually sounds like this: “I don’t need to understand the tech. I manage outcomes.” It is normally followed by a transformation programme, several reorganisations, collapsing morale, and a very expensive consultancy engagement that promises clarity and delivers polished slideware.
Managing technologists without understanding technology is not a neutral handicap; it is an active risk multiplier, and the more complex the environment, the more damaging the ignorance becomes.
Consider the keep fit instructor who is visibly overweight and hasn’t exercised in years. They may possess a certification, a job title, and a timetable full of classes, but they cannot teach what they do not know or do not believe in. Their clients sense it immediately and the credibility is gone before a single word is spoken. Technology leadership is no different. You cannot guide people through terrain you have never traversed, and you cannot inspire standards you cannot demonstrate.
So here is the guide you asked for.
1. Start by Accepting You Are Blind
If you do not understand software architecture, distributed systems, infrastructure, security models, delivery pipelines, data structures, and operational constraints, then you are blind to the shape of the terrain. You cannot properly see tradeoffs, shortcuts, fragility, or when someone is bluffing. Technology is not like sales or marketing where outcomes are often decoupled from deep domain mechanics. In technology, the mechanics are the outcome, and architecture decisions made in a whiteboard session today will determine scalability, cost, resilience, and regulatory exposure five years from now.
If you do not understand that dynamic, you are not steering the organisation. You are sitting in the passenger seat while pretending to hold a wheel.
2. Stop Pretending Delivery Is Just Project Management
Non technical leaders often default to process pageantry because it is visible and legible. They add more standups, more dashboards, more governance forums, and more colour coded status reports in the belief that visibility equals control, and none of these artefacts fix poor architecture, reduce technical debt, compensate for a misaligned data model, or create good engineers.
When you cannot evaluate technical quality directly, you over index on visible artefacts. Documentation begins to look like competence and velocity charts start to look like value, while entropy compounds quietly underneath the surface until the system appears orderly right up until it fails.
3. You Will Optimise for the Wrong Things
If you do not understand technology, you will optimise for what you can easily measure. Feature count, story points, headcount, burn rate, vendor promises, and analyst positioning become proxies for progress because they are tangible and easy to present upward.
Technologists, however, optimise for variables that are less visible but far more consequential: latency, throughput, failure domains, blast radius, observability, coupling, and long term maintainability. These variables are not intuitive if you have never built and operated systems, so you unintentionally pressure teams to move in directions that make the system worse while appearing more productive, celebrating feature velocity while quietly accumulating architectural collapse.
4. You Will Reward Confidence Over Competence
In technical environments, there are engineers who explain complexity cautiously and engineers who promise simplification confidently. If you cannot evaluate the substance behind those positions, you will reward the confidence because it is easier to understand and more comforting to hear, and the loud architect who claims “this is easy” will often outrank the quiet engineer who warns that the proposal will create long term fragility.
Over time, bad decisions institutionalise themselves. Real builders leave because their judgement is repeatedly overruled by narrative, political performers remain because they are aligned with what leadership can recognise, and the technical centre of gravity shifts from engineering to performance and display. Once that shift occurs it is extremely difficult to reverse.
5. You Will Torture Your Best People
When a non technical leader takes over a technology team, they will almost always find A players. These are not hard to spot; their track record is documented, their peers defer to them, their output is measurable, and their understanding of the system is encyclopaedic. The leader knows they are exceptional, at some level, even if they cannot fully articulate why.
And then the arrogance kicks in.
The instinct, almost universal in management culture, is that a leader’s job is to grow people, stretch them, challenge them, help them reach the next level. It is a reasonable philosophy when applied to people whose craft you understand, but when applied to people whose craft you do not understand, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes interference dressed up as development.
If you do not understand what your A players do, you have exactly two choices. You can support them and back them, protecting their time, removing obstacles, giving them space and resources, trusting their judgement on things you cannot evaluate, and taking credit quietly while they build things that matter. Or you can torture them by second guessing their architecture, imposing frameworks on their process, redirecting their priorities based on what you read in a blog post, requiring them to justify decisions you are not equipped to interrogate, and surrounding them with governance theatre that treats excellence as a compliance risk.
Most leaders, through a combination of arrogance and insecurity, pick the latter. Not because they want to harm these engineers, but because doing nothing feels like weakness and intervening feels like leadership.
Would you try to make Messi a better footballer? No reasonable person would. His ability sits so far outside the frame of what most people understand about the game that any attempt to coach his technique would be embarrassing at best and destructive at worst. But you could absolutely annoy him. You could put him in pointless meetings, make him justify his positioning in writing before every match, give him a development plan with SMART objectives around his dribbling, and restructure the squad based on a consultancy report that missed the point of everything he does. You would not improve him by a single percentage point, but you could make his life miserable enough that he eventually decides to go somewhere his talent is simply trusted.
That is what happens to the best engineers under technically illiterate leadership. They are not developed; they are worn down. The organisation loses not because it failed to hire them, but because it could not leave them alone long enough to let them do what they were hired to do.
The correct posture, and the one that requires more confidence than most leaders possess, is to recognise that your job with an A player is not to improve them. It is to protect them from everything that would prevent them from doing what they are already exceptional at, including protecting them from you.
6. Your Best Engineers Are Not Difficult. They Are Precise.
Here is something most leadership development programmes will never tell you, because it makes people uncomfortable and does not fit neatly into a competency framework. A significant proportion of your best technologists will be somewhere on the autism spectrum, and if you lead a technology team of any size and you have not thought about this, you are probably already causing harm without realising it.
I say this with some personal authority. I know what it is like to sit in a one on one with a leader carrying the weight of a dozen things that are not quite right, not quite finished, not quite as they should be, and for that accumulation of imperfection to feel genuinely overwhelming in a way that is very difficult to explain to someone who does not experience it. The system that was supposed to be elegant has a workaround in it that offends me. The process that was agreed is being quietly ignored two layers down. The architecture review produced a decision I know is wrong and I cannot fully articulate why yet, but I know. All of it sits there, loudly, simultaneously, refusing to be backgrounded.
This is not overthinking or a bad day; this is the texture of how some of the best technical minds in your organisation experience ordinary working life.
The engineers who can hold the entire dependency graph of a distributed system in their heads, who will spend three days tracking down a race condition that everyone else declared intermittent and therefore tolerable, who will tell you in a meeting that your proposed timeline is wrong and then prove it with a spreadsheet they built the night before. These people are often wired in ways that make the social world genuinely confusing and frequently exhausting. The unwritten rules of corporate life, the performative enthusiasm, the deliberate ambiguity of political communication, the expectation that you will nod along to things that are demonstrably incorrect. None of this makes sense to them, because it does not, in any objective sense, make sense.
They are not being difficult; they are being accurate, and in an environment that rewards impression management over truth telling, accuracy feels like a personality defect.
The best leaders I have had understood something that no management course teaches: they regulated me. They would sit with all of that accumulated frustration and imperfection and noise, extract it, absorb it, and then look at me and say, with complete calm and without patronising me, “don’t worry, we’ve got this.” And they meant it, and I believed them, and I would leave that room more settled, more functional, more capable of doing the work than when I went in. Not because the problems had been solved, but because the weight of them had been shared by someone I trusted to carry part of it, and that is not therapy; it is leadership, and it is one of the most valuable things a leader can do for someone wired this way.
Poor leaders have the exact opposite effect. They enter the same conversation and somehow amplify the noise. They add their own anxiety to it, or they dismiss it, or they respond with process: a new governance step, a new status update cadence, a new framework for tracking the very things that are causing the distress. The engineer leaves more dysregulated than they arrived, the problems feel larger, the system feels less trustworthy, and the leader wonders why their best people seem increasingly difficult to reach.
Your job, if you want to lead these people well, is not to fix them but to connect with them. That means being explicit where others are implicit, saying what you actually mean and meaning what you say, because mixed messages do not create ambiguity for these engineers, they create anxiety. It means understanding that a flat affect in a meeting is not disengagement, that bluntness is not aggression, and that a refusal to pretend something is fine when it is not fine is a form of intellectual integrity you should be grateful for rather than irritated by.
It also means learning to find the humour in it together. The engineer who sends a seventeen paragraph reply to a two line email is not being obstructive. The one who corrects your grammar in a company all hands presentation is not trying to embarrass you. The one who brings printed documentation to a one on one to ensure the discussion stays on track is not passive aggressive; they are just trying to make sure the meeting actually accomplishes something. If you can sit with that, name it lightly, and laugh alongside rather than at, you will build a quality of trust that most leaders never achieve with these engineers, because most leaders never bothered to understand them at all.
And then there is gratitude, not the performative kind that appears in award ceremonies or quarterly newsletters, but the specific, direct, concrete kind. Tell them exactly what they built and why it mattered. Tell them the problem that would have remained unsolved without their particular way of thinking about it. Tell them the moment when their stubbornness about the correct approach saved the organisation from an expensive mistake. These engineers are often the last to be recognised and the first to absorb the social friction their precision creates, and a specific acknowledgement, delivered sincerely and without corporate packaging, lands very differently for someone who has spent a career being told, in various polite ways, that they are too much.
The world does not always make sense to them, and an organisation built on hierarchy, narrative, and social performance is a strange and often hostile place for a mind optimised for truth, precision, and depth. You cannot change that, but you can be the person in the room who sees them clearly, absorbs some of the weight, treats their way of being as the asset it is, and makes sure they know it, and that is not a leadership programme; it is just decency, and in the context of a technology organisation, decency toward the people who actually build things is rarer than it should be and more powerful than most leaders realise.
7. You Cannot Challenge What You Cannot Comprehend
Technology is an infinite game with no final state, no point at which the architecture is finished, no moment at which the risk register closes. Technologists need to be continuously challenged on the risks they are taking, the ones they are avoiding, and the ones they have not yet imagined.
The problem is that you can only challenge someone meaningfully on risks you understand yourself. Asking “is this secure?” is not a risk challenge; it is a reassurance request. Asking “what happens to our blast radius if this service goes down and we haven’t yet decoupled it from the payment pipeline?” is a risk challenge. The difference between the two is entirely domain knowledge.
An unfit keep fit instructor cannot push a client to lift heavier, run faster, or change technique, because they have no lived reference point for what that effort requires or what the ceiling looks like, so they can only observe and encourage vaguely. Technology leaders who lack technical fluency are in the same position, able to express concern without providing direction and ask for reassurance without being able to evaluate the answer.
Your technology team needs to be taught more than they need to be managed. The best technology leaders are not administrators of delivery; they are force multipliers of learning who challenge engineers to take the right risks, at the right time, with the right level of understanding, because they have taken those risks themselves and know what the terrain looks like.
8. The Tiebreaker Will Expose You
All of the failures described so far are slow burning and compound over months and years, but there is a failure mode that is immediate, irreversible, and often invisible until long after the damage is done. It happens in a single moment, in a single room, when a technology decision reaches an impasse and someone has to break the tie.
Go left or go right. Microservices or monolith. Rewrite or refactor. Buy the platform or build the capability. Every significant technology programme eventually produces a moment where the room is split, the debate has exhausted itself, and the decision falls to the leader.
If you do not understand technology, you will do two things at this moment: you will look for the most confident voice in the room, and you will look for consensus, and both are close to useless in technology decisions. Confidence in technology debates is often inversely correlated with accuracy, because the engineer who is certain always sounds better than the one who is careful. Consensus frequently means that the genuinely correct view has been worn down until it resembles the most palatable one, so you end up not with the best answer but with the answer that survived the politics of the room, a difference that often only becomes visible eighteen months later when the system fails in exactly the way someone quietly predicted it would.
A technically fluent leader does something entirely different at the tiebreaker moment: they go looking for the least articulate person in the room. In technology debates, the person who is struggling to express themselves is very often struggling because what they understand is genuinely complex and they are trying to be precise about it, while the person who is fluent and confident is very often fluent because they have simplified the problem to the point where it is no longer quite the problem under discussion. The technical truth tends to live with the person who cannot easily surface it, not the one who can.
So the fluent leader moves toward that person, asks different questions, pulls at threads, and follows the hesitation rather than the assertion. They are looking not for a clean answer but for the signal buried inside the difficulty, and when they find it, when they understand what that engineer is actually saying, they do something that looks almost magical from the outside. They translate it. They take the thing that barely made it out of that engineer’s mouth in any coherent form and rebuild it in language that the room can hold, assess, and ultimately support.
That is the tiebreaker: not a vote, not a consensus exercise, not a decision by the loudest or most senior person, but a translation act performed by someone with enough fluency to recognise truth when it is expressed badly. You cannot translate a language you do not speak, and if you lack the technical grounding to follow what the hesitant engineer is reaching toward, you will never find it. You will default to the confident voice because it is the only one you can understand, and the room will move in the direction of whoever performed best rather than whoever was most correct.
Now consider what rides on it. These are not abstract choices. A decision to rewrite a core system rather than refactor it consumes two years of engineering capacity. A decision to buy a platform rather than build the capability creates a dependency you may not be able to exit for a decade. A decision about which direction to take a data architecture shapes everything that can be built on top of it for the foreseeable future. The blast radius of a wrong tiebreaker call in technology is not a quarterly miss; it is an organisational trajectory.
This is the weight the leader has to carry when they walk out of that room, and here is the test that most do not anticipate: can you carry it? Can you hold the decision under pressure, when the first signs of difficulty emerge, when the engineers who disagreed begin to surface the consequences, when the board starts asking questions and the programme starts slipping? Can you stand behind a direction you genuinely understood and chose, or will you begin to drift?
Because if you did not truly comprehend the decision you made, you are not married to the reality of your situation. You are married to the confidence of whoever convinced you in the room, and confidence is a fragile thing to build an architecture on. The moment that person loses credibility, or leaves, or is contradicted by someone equally confident pointing the other way, you have no anchor and no independent understanding to return to. And so you flip. Left becomes right. The rewrite becomes a refactor. The bought platform gets abandoned for an internal build. The direction reverses not because the evidence changed but because the political gravity of the room shifted and you had no technical compass of your own to hold you in place.
This is one of the most destructive patterns in technology leadership and one of the least discussed. A wrong decision, held with genuine conviction and sufficient understanding, can usually be corrected, because the team understands the reasoning, can model the consequences, and can work with the leader to find the exit when one becomes necessary. But a decision that was never truly owned, that was borrowed from the most recent confident voice and never internalised, cannot be held under pressure. It evaporates, and what replaces it is another borrowed decision from another confident voice, in a different direction, carrying equal conviction and equal incomprehension.
The engineers watch this happen, recognise it immediately, and never quite forget it. Every reversal without a technical rationale tells them the same thing: the person at the front of the room does not understand what they are deciding. And once that is understood, something quietly breaks in the relationship between the team and the leader that process, communication, and culture programmes are essentially powerless to repair.
The tiebreaker is not a ceremony; it is a test of genuine comprehension. Leaders who pass it rarely talk about it. Leaders who fail it rarely know they did.
9. You Will Build a Human ETL Layer
When leaders cannot understand technology directly, they often attempt to compensate by inserting translation layers. Middle management swells because it feels safer to add interpreters than to build fluency, and technologists are carved into smaller and smaller execution pools, each overseen by coordinators, delivery leads, programme managers, and transformation managers whose primary function is to convert engineering reality into executive friendly language and then back again.
You effectively create a human ETL pipeline where engineers produce signal, middle management extracts it, transforms it into multiple narratives, and loads it into reporting decks, governance packs, quarterly reviews, risk registers, and strategy updates. The same underlying data has to be repackaged repeatedly, often at the last minute, into slightly different formats for different audiences who are all looking at the same system from different distances, so a status update becomes a slide, the slide becomes a summary, the summary becomes a dashboard, the dashboard becomes a talking point, and each layer slightly reshapes the original meaning until what returns to the engineers barely resembles what they said.
The result is leadership overhead that can approach one hundred percent of an engineer’s day. There are just enough managers to guarantee standstill, but also just enough structure to produce a compelling explanation for why five minute tasks take months. If you push for more detail and start asking simple, concrete questions about how the pieces actually connect, you quickly break through what is effectively a house of cards, and the structural weakness becomes visible the moment someone insists on tracing a single initiative from idea to code to production without translation.
Meanwhile, each pool of middle managers attempts to assimilate technologists into increasingly elaborate planning cycles that look sophisticated but are predominantly meaningless in terms of actual system improvement. Roadmaps multiply, initiative names proliferate, and transformation themes evolve quarterly, while engineers spend more time feeding the machinery than building the product. It is movement without progress, coordination without coherence, and planning without proximity to the underlying system.
10. You Will Reach for Redis
At some point, a performance issue will surface: a page is slow, an API spikes under load, a batch job overruns. Without deep technical understanding, the reflex will be to reach for something additive that sounds modern and powerful, and very often that something is Redis. A cache feels like a silver bullet because it is easy to describe, easy to procure, and easy to present as decisive action, so you add Redis, cache the responses, and declare the problem solved.
Never do this blindly.
In environments that are already poorly maintained, layered with undocumented hacks and historical shortcuts, adding another cache rarely simplifies anything. It compounds opacity, because someone else almost certainly solved a similar problem years ago with an ad hoc cache, a materialised view, a hidden flag, or a brittle optimisation buried deep in the stack. Adding another caching layer on top of that mess does not create clarity; it creates non deterministic behaviour where you now have stale data in two places, cache invalidation logic that nobody fully understands, and outages that are less frequent but far more mysterious. Symptoms disappear under light load and reappear under pressure, and incidents become ghost hunts through layers of state that were never designed to coexist.
Performance issues are almost always symptoms of poor data models, missing indexes, chatty services, or architectural coupling that should have been addressed at the root, and caching over the top of structural problems is like soundproofing a cracked engine. It may quiet the noise for a while, but the fracture is still there. I am speaking to you from a future world where mankind was destroyed by Redis caches, not because Redis is bad technology, but because leaders kept layering fixes onto systems they did not understand, mistaking addition for improvement and opacity for sophistication.
11. Your Performance System Is Designed for the Wrong Job
The most damaging version of non technical leadership emerges when ignorance is combined with rigid HR performance systems. Intellectual property creation and deep engineering work are treated as a sequence of discrete tasks that will conveniently complete at the end of a performance window, as though innovation obeys a payroll calendar, and complex compounding work is compressed into quarterly objectives with the implicit assumption that architecture matures on schedule and technical debt dissolves when the review cycle closes.
At the same time, teams are asked to pivot every few weeks to “do the right thing.” Strategy shifts, priorities are redefined, and long term coherence is sacrificed to short term narrative alignment, with engineers told to think strategically and act long term while being redirected repeatedly in response to executive mood or market noise.
The final irony arrives at performance review time, when engineers are asked to produce detailed lists of everything they have been working on because leadership is “not close to the details” and needs to “fight your case.” The people evaluating the work do not understand it deeply, have not remained close enough to observe its nuance, have redirected it multiple times, and now require the engineer to reconstruct a defensible narrative so it can be translated into HR language. This is not management; it is bureaucratic choreography layered on top of creative work. The predictable outcome is that engineers optimise for what fits the performance template rather than what improves the system, artefact production replaces intellectual capital creation, and the organisation quietly bleeds capability while believing it has strengthened accountability.
12. Consultants Will Smell You
When leadership cannot interrogate architecture, vendors and consultancies quickly shape the worldview of the organisation. They sell platforms instead of solving problems, roadmaps instead of capability, and integration diagrams that look impressive in a board pack but age badly in production, and large multi year programmes are approved on the basis of presentation craft because decision makers cannot distinguish elegance from illusion. Once the contract is signed, leverage disappears and complexity increases, and the organisation becomes dependent on external interpreters of its own system because it never developed the internal literacy to challenge them.
13. Culture Will Decay
Technologists do not expect their leaders to be the best engineers in the room, but they do expect them to understand what good looks like. When leaders cannot distinguish good from bad engineering, performance management becomes arbitrary, excellence is not consistently recognised, mediocrity is not corrected, and incentives drift toward visibility rather than substance.
High performers disengage first because they feel unseen and unprotected, others follow more slowly, and what remains is process compliance without technical ambition, where energy is directed toward surviving the system rather than improving it.
14. You Have Three Options. One of Them Is Honest.
Everything described in this article is avoidable. The failures are not inevitable features of technology organisations; they are the predictable consequences of a specific leadership posture, and there is a corresponding set of behaviours that produce entirely different outcomes. Before we conclude, here is what the alternative actually looks like in practice.
If you are leading a technology team right now, ask yourself honestly whether you do these things.
Do you read architectural decision records, not to approve them but to understand the reasoning and the tradeoffs that were made? Do you attend incident postmortems as a learner rather than a judge, sitting with engineers as they walk through what failed and why? Do you seek out the quietest, most hesitant voice in a technical debate before you form a view, rather than defaulting to the most articulate one? Do you protect your best people’s time and attention from organisational noise, including your own, rather than filling their calendar with your curiosity? Do you give specific, technical acknowledgement of good work rather than generic praise that tells the engineer you did not actually understand what they built? Do you sit with a struggling engineer’s frustration rather than redirecting it into process, and do you leave them more capable of doing their job than when they came to you? Do you hold your own positions under pressure rather than drifting toward the last confident voice that spoke to you?
If you can answer yes to most of those questions, you are doing the job. If you cannot, you have three realistic options.
The first is to learn. You do not need to become a principal engineer, but you do need genuine fluency: understanding system design, distributed failure, data models, security primitives, and cloud economics beyond marketing diagrams. That means reading postmortems, studying real outages, reviewing architectural decision records, and sitting in on incident calls to observe how reality behaves under pressure. Fluency transforms the questions you ask, and in technology leadership the quality of your questions is your primary leverage. More than that, it transforms the challenges you can issue, because a technically fluent leader does not just approve or decline; they teach. They push engineers toward risks worth taking and away from risks that are not yet understood, and that is what coaching from credibility actually looks like.
The second option is to install real technical authority. If you cannot or will not build fluency yourself, place someone with deep operational experience in a position of genuine power, not a ceremonial CTO, not a slide producing chief architect, not a politically safe technologist, but someone who has built and operated systems at scale. Give them real authority to veto nonsense, protect them from organisational posturing, and actually listen when they speak.
The third option is the most uncomfortable but often the most responsible: do not take the role. If you fundamentally do not respect the craft of engineering or have no intention of understanding it, leading technologists is not a neutral career move. Technology organisations are compounding systems where small misunderstandings become large liabilities, and leadership ignorance does not remain static. It accumulates.
The honest answer to the question of how you manage technologists if you do not understand technology is simple. You do not.
Conclusion: If You Don’t Know Which Port You’re Sailing To, No Wind Is Favourable
Seneca wrote that if a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable. It is one of the most precise descriptions of ineffective leadership ever committed to paper, and it applies to technology leadership with a force that would have surprised even him.
Every resource described in this article, the A players, the engineers on the spectrum with their extraordinary precision, the quiet voice in the room who understands what no one else can articulate, the tiebreaker that determines the next three years of your organisation’s trajectory, is meaningless if the person at the helm does not know where they are going or how to navigate the waters between here and there. Opportunity without direction is just noise. Talent without navigation is just potential that never arrives.
And technology is not calm water. Technologists will create small storms, not out of malice but out of the very qualities that make them exceptional. A team that cares deeply about doing things correctly will resist shortcuts. An engineer who understands the long term consequences of an architectural decision will push back hard on a timeline that makes that decision impossible to reverse. A system under growth pressure will behave in ways nobody predicted, and the team will need to adjust the sails, shift course around something treacherous, and hold steady while the weather is bad. All of this is normal. All of this is the sea.
What is not normal, and what this article has tried to name clearly, is a leader who responds to every gust by changing destination. Who sees turbulence as a sign that the original course was wrong rather than a feature of the journey. Who, when the navigation becomes difficult, retreats to the comfort of floating, running standups, producing dashboards, filling governance forums, and calling it progress. Floating is easy. The sea is not hostile to a ship that is going nowhere. But you will not arrive anywhere either, and if you stay out there long enough, drifting in whatever direction the wind is currently blowing, the outcome is not comfortable stagnation. The outcome is that you die at sea.
There is a persistent myth that leadership is domain agnostic, that management skill transfers cleanly across any discipline, and that intelligence combined with frameworks equals competence. This belief collapses under scrutiny. You would not manage surgeons without understanding anatomy, pilots without understanding aviation risk, or nuclear engineers without understanding reactor physics, and you would not hire an unfit keep fit instructor and expect the class to improve. Credibility in any craft leadership role comes from having done the work, understood the pain, and earned the right to set the standard.
Software now runs banks, hospitals, logistics networks, defence systems, and the infrastructure of daily life. Yet organisations routinely install leaders who proudly declare that they are “not technical” as though it were a virtue. Technology teams do not need more managers. They need someone who knows the destination, understands the vessel, can read the water, and has enough respect for the crew to trust them when the conditions get hard. That requires someone who has skin in the same game, not someone observing it from the executive floor through a reporting dashboard.
If you do not understand technology and do not intend to learn, the most responsible leadership decision you can make is not to lead technologists.
For those who intend to do it properly, here is the summary of what that looks like.
| Do | Don’t | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Read architectural decision records as a learner | Approve or reject decisions you cannot evaluate | Architecture made today determines scalability, cost, and risk exposure for years |
| Attend incident postmortems to understand what failed and why | Use postmortems to assign blame or demonstrate authority | Systems fail in patterns; a leader who understands failure modes asks better questions before the next incident |
| Seek the quietest, most hesitant voice in a technical debate | Default to the most confident or most senior voice | Confidence in technical debates is often inversely correlated with accuracy; the truth lives with the person struggling to surface it |
| Protect your A players’ time and focus, including from yourself | Impose development frameworks on people whose craft you cannot evaluate | Exceptional engineers leave not because they lack opportunity but because they cannot find the space to do exceptional work |
| Sit with an engineer’s frustration and absorb the weight of it | Respond to distress with process, new meetings, or new governance steps | A leader who regulates rather than amplifies will get more from their best people than any performance system ever will |
| Give specific, technical acknowledgement of what was built and why it mattered | Offer generic praise that signals you did not understand the work | Engineers who feel unseen by leadership disengage first and quietly; you will not know they have gone until they have left |
| Hold your technical positions under pressure | Flip direction when a confident voice contradicts the last confident voice | A decision that is never truly owned cannot be sustained; every reversal without rationale erodes the team’s trust in leadership permanently |
| Install genuine technical authority with real power to veto | Install a ceremonial CTO or a politically safe architect | Translating engineering reality requires someone who speaks the language; a figurehead simply adds another layer to the human ETL pipeline |
| Learn enough to ask the question behind the question | Ask for reassurance dressed as challenge | The difference between “is this secure?” and “what is our blast radius if this service fails before we decouple it?” is the difference between a leader and a passenger |
| Know your destination and hold it through the storms | Drift toward whatever the wind is currently blowing | Technology will always create turbulence; a leader without a fixed destination will mistake every gust for a reason to change course, and eventually die at sea |
In conclusion, don’t.