What the comfort zone of a Leader looks like
Common mistakes which give you the illusion of having the situation under control
I was an individual contributor for more than a decade and the activity that I enjoyed the most in my role was always coding. You have the power to create things with your hands and see applications take shape thanks to your effort. Even though it may not be considered an easy activity, it gives you immediate feedback:
“the application works” ✅
“ehy, this code is as hard as hell to maintain and evolve” ❌
This, of course, doesn’t apply when your main focus is not writing code but managing people. Feedback is neither immediate nor tangible most of the time.
It was too early in my career when my first experience as a leader happened. After a couple of years as a developer, I found myself managing a team of six without any dedicated training, and, even worse, without having gained the necessary on-the-job experience. Looking back at those days, I realized I wasn’t good enough at either properly leading a team or making informed technical decisions. Was that a complete disaster? Luckily, it wasn’t. I was fortunate as my team was composed of talented individuals, but it could have been much worse.
At that time, my understanding of leading a team was to assign team members individual weekly tasks and check on a daily basis that they were actually working on them. At the same time, I was busy working on my own tasks, so what else could my job consist of?
I couldn't have been more wrong about what leadership entails 🙅
After two years in that role, I decided to transition back to an individual contributor position to gain the necessary experience, particularly in technical growth. But, why am I telling you this seemingly boring story?
Returning to the present day, there are plenty of takeaways from that experience. Nevertheless, there are still moments when I find myself repeating some of those mistakes I made back then. When things aren't going well, it's natural to revert to our comfort zone, which gives us the illusion of having the situation under control.
In this article, I've collected some of the attitudes I've noticed in myself when I tend to slide back into my comfort zone as a leader.
🔎 The Micromanagement trap
When your team is dealing with a very tight deadline and, for some reasons, the pace is not as expected, the micromanager within you takes control. It takes over and introduces a series of attitudes that quickly damage the team.
While your responsibility as a leader should be to remove obstacles for your team, you start to see everything as a roadblock that will further slow down the work. As a result, you start making decisions for them at every level, even where there is no need for you to do so. Worse yet, your decisions may even be more harmful.
The following are what I consider my alarm bells, and as soon as I notice them, I immediately activate the "reset" procedure:
I tend to intervene in every small detail of a task, from its definition to how to write the code and even the tests
I ask for progress updates more than once a day
I suggest pairing with myself just to “speed up” releases
I spend more time talking about how to do things rather than getting things done
The best advice I can give you about micromanagement is to stop immediately when you realize it and take a step back. It is crucial to understand the real cause of the anxiety and fear behind this attitude. 9 times out of 10, the deadline isn't the real reason. Trust your team, they will reward you properly.
🧑💻 Write more code than you’re supposed to write
For the same reasons I’ve just described, when the delivery doesn't happen as quickly as expected, it could trigger a mental mechanism where we start to believe that returning to what we did best, which is writing code, will significantly increase the overall velocity.
Nothing could be further from the truth 🙅
While I believe that it is acceptable in certain circumstances for leaders to get their hands dirty, they should refrain from solely assuming leadership roles in the project’s tasks. There are only negative consequences for this decision at every level:
From the team perspective: the people in the team will feel as if their leader has lost faith in their abilities. They won’t have the opportunity to autonomously solve problems that they are surely capable of tackling, and they won’t even have the chance to grow in decision-making. The worst consequence, however, is that the team doesn't have the opportunity to enhance their project knowledge, especially if the task is core to the project. This triggers a direct dependence on the leader who becomes the person with the greatest knowledge of the project, creating bottlenecks every time debugging or improving that domain part is necessary
From the company perspective: writing code is not the activity that generates the most value when you’re in a leadership role. Instead, focusing on someone else's responsibilities takes you away from core activities, causing delays in responding to people who are stuck because of you and procrastination of the other important tasks your role is responsible for. A leader is a roadblock remover, not a bottleneck creator
From the leader perspective: you’re just missing a good opportunity to grow as a leader. Situations like this are exactly why there needs to be someone leading a team. This is the moment when it's necessary to keep the team motivated, refine your delegation skills and foster a culture of collaboration
A healthy team is one in which roles are well-defined and clear, where everyone gives the best they can. Fail together, succeed together, grow together. Just be honest, transparent, and open to dialogue.
⚖️ Work-Life (un)balance
This is probably the first mistake I used to make as soon as things started to get complicated within the team. Spending more time on the project is the easiest way to seek comfort in these situations. It feels as though by working more time on the project, you are more “justified” if things don't go well. In reality, you achieve the opposite effect: more frustration and exhaustion. In a leadership role, furthermore, another undesirable effect arises: you set that expectation for everyone around you and foster a culture where overwork is normalized and expected.
Time management and delegation are key here. It may seem obvious, but it’s not about how much time you and your team spend on the project, it’s about the efficiency and effectiveness with which tasks are completed.
TL;DR
Everything revolves around trust 🤝. It's the glue that holds everything together. You must continually nurture trust within your team, especially when the team navigates through troubled waters.
Credits: Illustration 1