In the tech industry, where the battle for talent is a daily reality and remote and hybrid working is redefining the rules of collaboration, the quality of leadership is becoming a key factor in determining success or failure. Yet many companies fall into the same trap: managers oscillate between two damaging extremes – softness that avoids confrontation and micromanagement that suffocates creativity. Both paths, although seemingly different, lead to the same goal: declining engagement, high turnover and stagnation.
Today’s work culture, especially in the IT sector, promotes empathy and support. This is the right direction, but it has become distorted in many organisations. Managers, for fear of being seen as ‘toxic’, avoid difficult conversations. Feedback turns into vague suggestions wrapped in corporate jargon. Instead of a clear “this module does not meet the performance requirements, we need to redesign it”, the team hears: “we appreciate your efforts, maybe we will look at optimisation next time”.
This style of management, although dictated by good intentions, creates a culture of uncertainty. Employees do not know what the real expectations are and the lack of clear standards leads to a slow decline in quality. Projects get bogged down in endless discussions because no one wants to make a final, potentially unpopular decision. This condition, known as ‘analysis paralysis’, is, in the dynamic world of technology, a simple way to lose competitive advantage. Teams that do not receive honest feedback have no chance to grow.
At the other extreme is micromanagement – a relic of the industrial age that still poisons the culture of many tech companies. Managers who distrust their teams control every detail, from the content of emails to snippets of code. They demand constant reports, get involved in operational tasks and undermine the autonomy of the specialists they themselves have hired.
The effects are disastrous and well documented. Micromanagement kills intrinsic motivation and creativity. Instead of focusing on solving problems, employees concentrate their energies on satisfying their superior’s expectations and avoiding mistakes. Initiative disappears and responsibility becomes diluted. Moreover, the manager becomes the bottleneck of the organisation – overloaded with minutiae, he or she has no time for strategic thinking. As a result, the company loses doubly: the team’s potential is untapped and the leader is not doing his or her proper job.
Operational honesty
The solution is not to find the golden mean between being ‘nice’ and being ‘strict’. This is a false dichotomy. Effective leadership rests on a foundation that can be called operational honesty – the ability to combine direct, clear communication with genuine respect and trust in the team. It is a set of specific, learned skills, not an innate character trait.
1. communication based on facts, not on opinions
Rather than generalities like ‘good job, but…’, an effective leader is straightforward: ‘Deployment went smoothly, but load tests showed a 20% longer response time than we expected in the specification. We need to diagnose the cause by the end of the day”. Such a message is concrete, devoid of emotional judgement and action-oriented. It leaves no room for guesswork and builds a culture where problems are treated as engineering challenges rather than personal failures.
2. Decision-making under uncertainty
In IT, we rarely have a complete set of data. Waiting for the perfect solution is a luxury few can afford. Leaders need to cultivate a ‘bias for action’ in themselves and their teams. This means making decisions based on the information available, while assuming that the course may need to be corrected. As Jeff Bezos put it in one of his principles, most decisions are ‘reversible’. A mistake resulting from a decision is almost always less costly than the paralysis caused by the lack of a decision. It is the leader who takes responsibility for the decision, protecting the team from guilt if it fails.
3. autonomy through trust, not control
Instead of controlling how the work is done, the modern leader focuses on defining precisely what is to be achieved and why it is important. Delegating is not assigning tasks, but giving responsibility for an entire area. Instead of saying “design the button to this specification”, the leader is saying: “we need to redesign the onboarding process to reduce the rejection rate by 15%”. You have complete freedom to choose the methods and tools to achieve this goal’. Such a model builds commitment and allows specialists to use their full competence. The trust shown by the leader is reciprocated by the team in the form of maturity and proactivity.
Implications for organisations
Technology companies that want to survive and grow in the long term need to invest in the competence development of their managers. The days of carrot-and-stick motivation are irrevocably gone. Retaining talent in a competitive market requires an environment based on honesty, autonomy and trust.
Effective leadership training programmes do not teach magic formulas, but practical tools: how to have difficult conversations in a constructive way, how to make quick decisions based on incomplete data and how to build teams that do not need supervision. This is no longer a ‘soft’ skill, but a hard, measurable competence that directly translates into financial performance and innovation for the entire organisation. Leadership is no longer a matter of personal style – it has become a key element of business strategy.
