1. Leadership Styles

How we lead, or more explicitly, how direct we are when leading, is proportional to how technical we need to be. Figure 1 shows the Dictatorship Spectrum. On the left side, we operate in a dictatorial manner and therefore require high technical abilities. On the right side, we operate in an empowering and consultative manner, so our technical ability and currency can be reduced while remaining a high performance technical leader.

Figure 1: The Dictatorship Spectrum

That is, if we are going to prescribe solutions and strategies to our teams, we’d better be great at technology! But this isn’t an excuse to stay technical and directive; that just doesn’t scale to any size. The more people and teams under our leadership, the more consultative and empowering our leadership needs to be.

In the startup world, the small team size (typically less than 10) often means that the CTO spends a lot of time hands-on. There’s no other way around it; startup CTOs generally need to make a hands-on contribution. Conversely, as a CTO of a large organisation, our success is not determined by our hands-on contribution. Our role is to guide and shape longer term, strategic enablement of the business and to grow the technical capability around us to the appropriate scale. Figure 2 demonstrates the combination of leadership style and company size as it relates to technical capability.