Leadership in a tech company's engineering organization takes many forms, often distributed across different roles and levels:
people leadership
inspiring and motivating employees
guiding employees through promotions
distilling company and org messaging to the team
occasionally unblocking administrative tasks (such as HR, IT, benefits)
handling performance reviews, hiring, onboarding, firing, internal transfers, leaves
team leadership
translating company and org goals and feedback to team and individual objectives
aggregating and presenting the team’s work to higher-ups
managing inter-team collaboration and requests (from the team to other teams and reverse)
workload leadership
assigning tasks and ensuring completion
project leadership
managing interconnected tasks, timelines and deliverables
incident management leadership
organizing and coordinating incident response (outages, urgent bug fixes)
strategic technical leadership
selecting technologies and vendors
managing vendor relationships
long-term technical planning
non-strategic technical leadership
reviewing code
raising bar on code quality
explaining difficult aspects of systems and codebases to other engineers
identifying opportunities for technical improvements
managing technical roadmap for a service or a system
Each company’s engineering culture and history influence how these responsibilities are delegated to different roles and levels at the company. For example, first-line managers might get to do people leadership, while directors and up will own technical strategy. Similarly, project management could be done by dedicated PMs or by existing engineering managers.
Often some of these leadership aspects emerge organically - an engineer who consistently provides thoughtful code reviews over time may naturally become a leader in this specific part of the codebase.
Common Misconceptions About Leadership
I have seen people make a few key mistakes when thinking about leadership:
believing only senior engineers or managers can be leaders
assuming that when a company delegates a certain leadership responsibility to a role, all individuals in this role across the company are actually doing it (or are good at it)
expecting all teams within a company to divide leadership responsibilities the same way
Recognizing these different kinds of leadership - and how they manifest in your company, within your org and on your team - can help you grow as a leader, regardless of your title.