In the life of a tech worker, such as an engineer, product manager, or designer, there is a time and opportunity to step into a leadership role. There are many good (and not-so-good) reasons to step into these roles. In the case of so many people around me, It was mainly because they believed they could do a better job than others. This was not necessarily because they were superbly good at leadership from day one but primarily because the leadership approach others had in mind differed from how they felt we should run a tech team and organisation.
People who step into leadership roles have more impact on the organisation for various reasons, such as 1) they are equipped with a better vantage point and data, and 2) their decisions intrinsically have more impact/risk. In other words, you are more of a multiplier than the maker. If, as a leader, you can strike the right balance between the maker and multiplier side, you may succeed at both. Some leaders lean into the leadership side of their job so much for so long that they lose touch with the real world, or others cannot let go of their maker personality and leave an evergrowing gap in their organisation’s leadership capability.
This may oversimplify my analogy, but being a maker is like having a Donut and how the sugar* rushes to your brain immediately after that. You get that feedback loop after each successful code run or after releasing a new feature to your customers and seeing the results on the graphs. In other words, the feedback loop is immediate, from a few minutes (running your code) to a few days (releasing a new feature to customers).
On the other hand, leadership’s feedback loop is in the mid to long-term future (at least you hope so). Building culture, sustaining change, changing behaviour, and incentivising good habits take time. As a leader, it takes time to see the result of your plans and have a feedback loop. This could be analogous to training for a marathon. As a novice, it takes months to see improvements in your endurance or quantitative metrics like VO2 max. Usually, the metrics drop for worse before they get better. And there is always a chance of injury that requires you to rest, recover, and restart (i.e. going back to the whiteboard in business terms).
As a leader, you spend much of your time on the multiplier rather than the maker side. Sometimes, you still make things, but they differ from what you want to make. Instead, they are things you can make better than others. No matter how much of a founder mode you manifest, you still need to “jump on a quick call” to unblock a project. Most of these actions’ feedback loop is in the future, and sometimes you won’t notice the impact (not at least if everything goes alright). Lack of an immediate feedback loop can create chronic fatigue and dissatisfaction in your job in the long term. That is one of the reasons that some leaders tend to step down further in their careers and become individual contributors again.
This is where Donut Day comes into the picture. As a leader, you should be more mindful of a few things than before, and your effort pie (where you spend your time) is one of them. No matter how much of a multiplier you are, you should dedicate some days, with enough frequency (weekly), to shut down Slack/emails and make things (e.g. have a Donut) that give you (not necessarily the organisation) that immediate feedback loop (sugar hit). While this Donut Day is for you, it also benefits your organisation. First and most importantly, you stay hands-on and maintain an avenue to stay connected to what is happening on the factory floor. Second, there is less likelihood that your organisation will lose a good leader with years of training and experience.
Just be careful not to put yourself on a critical path of your teams, and beware of the gravitational forces of being a maker (e.g. sugar is highly addictive)
Fin.
*sugar and fat have an addictive impact on your brain, and that is why you keep craving for more.