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If leadership feels harder than engineering, even though you’re good at your job, that’s not a confidence issue. It’s not imposter syndrome, and it’s not because you’ve suddenly forgot how to think. It’s because the rules changed quietly and no one explained the new ones. I didn’t realize this was happening to me at the time.

I just knew that decisions involving people, priorities, and direction suddenly felt heavier than any technical problem I’d solved before. At first, I assumed that meant I was missing something. That I just needed more experience, more context, maybe a little more confidence.

What I didn’t realize was that the work itself had changed.

Up to now on this podcast, we’ve been talking about how engineers lose self-trust when they step into leadership roles. Today, I wanted to talk about why leadership feels fundamentally different from technical work and what that means for how you operate going forward.

Episodes 1 through 6 were diagnostic. We started with invisible competence. Being good at your job, but no longer being able to clearly see or articulate your value.

Then we talked about certainty. How engineers often compensate for that invisibility by becoming overly precise, overly confident, overly definitive.

When certainty stops working, many engineers move into performance. Doing more, carrying more, becoming the person everyone depends on. That often leads to staying longer than you should. Not because it’s healthy, but because leaving feels risky when your identity is tied to execution.

And over time, something subtle happens. You start to doubt your own judgment. Not all at once. Quietly. Gradually.

That wasn’t a list of personal failures.

It was a pattern many engineers fall into when they apply technical rules to non-technical work. For me, the clearest example of that pattern was staying too long. Not months too long, years too long. It made perfect sense while I was there. I felt loyal, responsible, needed.

If I wasn’t the one doing the work, who would? That did not feel like avoidance. It felt like professionalism. And that’s why it was hard to see. Episode six closed that arc intentionally. If you recognized yourself anywhere in that progression, that’s a good sign. It means your internal alarm system still works.

Most people mute that alarm. They stay busy. They rationalize. They tell themselves, this is just how leadership feels. If you’re listening and something felt uncomfortably familiar, you didn’t ignore it. You heard it.

What matters now is understanding what kind of environment leadership actually is.

Engineering rewards correctness. Leadership demands judgment. Those are not the same skill. In engineering, the goal is to reduce uncertainty. You gather more data. You tighten the spec. You review the design. You get it peer checked. You wait for sign off.

The better you do your job, the less exposed you are. Leadership flips that script completely. You’re asked to act before certainty even exists with partial information, with people involved, and with consequences you can’t fully model. That doesn’t mean leadership is sloppier.

It means the signal to noise ratio is worse. Engineers struggle here not because they’re risk averse, but because they’ve been trained to treat uncertainty as a flaw instead of a condition.

In leadership, uncertainty isn’t a bug. It’s the standard operating environment. This is where leadership can start to feel irresponsible. You’re making calls without complete information. You’re deciding while variables are still in motion. And that creates friction for an engineering mind that’s been rewarded for certainty its entire career.

Here’s where a lot of engineers really get tripped up. The feedback loop changes. In technical work, feedback is relatively fast. Outcomes are measurable. Errors are usually local. Often, you can model problems out before they ever reach the field. In leadership, feedback is delayed. Outcomes are noisy. And errors feel personal. You see this clearly in hiring decisions. An engineer delays because they want certainty. They seek more information. They try to map out resource loading perfectly. They wait for the right moment. And by the time they’re ready to decide, the candidate has already accepted another offer.

I saw this early in my own career. I had two verbal offers on the table and needed them in writing, obviously. One company moved quickly and I worked there for 25 years. The other company waited for certainty. I’m still waiting for that offer. When feedback slows down and becomes ambiguous, your brain fills in the gap. And the story it often tells is,

I must not be very good at this. That’s a misread. What you’re actually experiencing is exposure. You’re closer to the decision surface. You own the call. There’s no specification to hide behind. Engineers aren’t uncomfortable with responsibility. We take it on with every design review and every stamp we apply. But we’re uncomfortable without guardrails.

Most engineers respond to this discomfort by trying to feel more certain, more thinking, more analysis, more waiting. That works in technical systems. It backfires in human ones. In leadership, readiness rarely comes before action. It follows it. This is why many people stall.

Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re lazy. But because they’re trying to solve a judgment problem with correctness tools.

What decision are you waiting on right now?

The longer you wait, the more hesitation reinforces itself. So here’s the reframe I want to leave you with. Leadership is not about being right. It’s about being willing to own the consequences of a decision and adjust. Good leadership decisions don’t often feel clean. They feel provisional. That doesn’t mean reckless.

It means reversible, calibrate-able, and learned through use. If you’re waiting to feel confident before acting, you’re using the wrong signal. The skill you’re building now isn’t confidence. It’s judgment under ambiguity. From here, the podcast gets more practical. Decision-making. Boundaries.

conversations that actually move things forward. But none of that works if you’re still judging yourself by technical rules in a leadership role. If leadership feels harder than engineering, that’s not a personal flaw. It’s evidence that the work changed and you’re still calibrating. That calibration is learnable and that’s what we’ll focus on next.

Thanks for listening. We’ll keep going.