This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

In the last episode, we talked about certainty, how engineers often lead with conclusions and how they can quietly shut down collaboration and credibility over time. There’s a common response when engineers start to feel that friction. If certainty stops working, they do what they’ve always done. They perform harder, they become faster, more reliable, more indispensable.

And that’s where this episode starts, when performance becomes strategy. Early in your career, being the go-to person is rewarded. You’re the one who can fix it. You know the system best. You respond quickly. You don’t drop the ball. So people come to you. Then they come to you first. Then they come to you exclusively. At some point, something shifts. You’re no longer just valuable.

You’re a bottleneck. Now let me pause here because this is where engineers usually misdiagnose the problem. They think the issue is workload. They say things like, I just need more time. I need better prioritization. I need fewer interruptions. But the real issue isn’t volume, it’s structure. High performers unintentionally train systems to rely on them. Not because they don’t want control (though sometimes they do). Not because they don’t trust others (sometimes they don’t), but because they care about the outcomes. Caring deeply is how this trap gets set. So what does it look like in practice? You’re leading a project, something goes sideways. You could delegate it, but you know you could just fix it faster yourself. So you do. Next time.

The same thing happens. Eventually, people stop even trying to solve that class of problem. They wait, and engineers often interpret that as incompetence or disengagement. But more often, it’s learned behavior. The system has adapted to you. This is where leadership growth stalls. Because leadership isn’t about being the best problem solver in the room, it’s about building a system that solves problems without you. And that requires something engineers are rarely taught. Letting things move slower in the short term so they can move without you in the long term. That trade-off is uncomfortable, especially if your identity has been built on competence and reliability. So what’s the hard part?

If your value is defined by being the hero, the system will keep you there. Not maliciously, but structurally. You become too important to move, too risky to promote, too critical to replace. And engineers are often confused by this. They think, I’m doing everything right, why am I stuck? Well, it’s because the system is optimized for you exactly for where you are, not for where you want to go. So this connects directly with the last two episodes. If you can’t see your value clearly, you’ll over perform to prove it. If certainty stops working, you’ll compensate by doing more. And if you do more without changing the structure around you, you don’t gain leverage, you lose it. So what do you do instead? Well, you don’t stop being good. You stop being the only one. Here’s a simple shift that matters. When something comes to you that you could solve quickly, just pause and ask yourself, is this a problem I need to solve or a capability I need to build in someone else?

If it’s second one, resist the urge to step in. Instead of fixing, you coach. Instead of executing, you explain. Instead of delivering the answer, you walk someone through your reasoning. Yes, it takes longer today. Yes, it’s messier, but it changes the system. Over time, people stop waiting.

they start thinking and you stop being the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean disappearing or delegating everything. It means being very intentional about where you add value and where you spend your time. Your job shifts from doing the work to shaping how the work gets done. That’s the move from expert to leader.

And it’s one of the hardest transitions engineers make because it requires letting go of the thing that made you successful in the first place. In the next episode, we’re going to talk about what happens when engineers feel this tension and stay anyway. Why smart, capable people remain in roles that slowly drain them. Not because they lack options, but because they’ve learned to rationalize discomfort as responsibility. That’s where we’re gonna go next.