Aug 25, 2025 8 min read

🐩 Leadership Muscles, Software Politics, Emotional Leaders, Dead Teams, Build vs Buy, Refining Habits: TMW #445

What lessons did you take from your first leadership role?

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Hello there, welcome to the week!

Muscular Hypertrophy and First-Time Leadership

My favourite conversation in the CTO Craft Slack this week began with a question about experiences in leading for the first time, the experiences and failures that made us stronger, the lessons we took into successive roles and the advice we'd give others making the leap for the first time.

Predictably, the most common answers were around the need to delegate and set personal boundaries, which are concepts that are difficult to fully implement when you're leaping from individual contribution, where you're measured on self-sufficiency and displaying your technical capability, and where feedback loops are short. In my own first leadership role (admittedly in a very early stage startup, where things moved fast, support was minimal and expectations were huge) I certainly hoarded much of what I saw as mission-critical work, didn't respect my own energy levels and attached too much of my ego to the work. And yep, I burned out.

But by experiencing that, my leadership muscles were torn and rebuilt stronger - and so, my advice to new leaders is to expect difficulty, and recognise that sometimes experience is the only way to build stronger muscles. It has to hurt a bit.

That's it, on with the links! See you next Monday

Andy @ CTO Craft

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Have an amazing week!

Andy