Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I'm currently writing this from a hotel room, but will probably be severely jet-lagged by the time you receive this issue. Hopefully, you will be rested and can read this issue.

I hope you had an uneventful weekend!

Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!

Things I enjoyed in the past week

• good people don't get blocked (X of all places), this short and sweet piece from Alli about agency at work.
• Where Do Humans Fit in AI-Assisted Software Development? another piece about how humans will never be out of the development loop, but we're shifting the role from purely coding to other, more management-like tasks.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about leadership from a very tactical angle: what work actually gets easier when leadership is good, and what work gets painfully expensive when it is not.

One of the most common things leadership books say is that leaders provide clarity.

After spending a few years working closer to leadership roles, I think that advice is correct, but still misunderstood.

But why is clarity so critical?. It is one of the main ways leadership reduces waste, enables decision-making, and helps people move with confidence.

What happens when leadership does not provide clarity

Sometimes a leader avoids giving direction because they want to empower the team.

That sounds reasonable, but in practice, it often becomes a hamster wheel. People are told they have space to figure things out, but they are not given a clear purpose, a decision boundary, or the trade-offs that matter most.

The result is rarely empowerment. More often, it is drift.

Different teams start pursuing different solutions. Everyone is making locally reasonable decisions, but from different assumptions. Then, later, the organization realizes it actually needed convergence, and multiple groups now have to rebuild the work they already did.

I have also seen the opposite problem: because there is no clear choice, every option stays open forever.

Should we do this now, or wait for the future platform? Should we migrate, or leave the current system alone? Should we optimize the current path, or invest in the next one?

Without clarity, these decisions do not stay flexible. They stay unresolved.

And unresolved decisions create their own cost:

• People hesitate to commit
• Migrations face more resistance
• Long-standing problems remain untouched
• Teams default to the status quo because it is the safest option

Clarity also makes the pressure visible

One thing I understand better now is why leadership can feel difficult.

Providing clarity usually means making hard choices before the future is fully known. It means saying yes to one path and no to another, even when both options have merit.

That creates pressure, because once you make the choice, people will move based on it.

But that pressure does not go away when leaders avoid clarity. It just gets pushed downward into the organization.

Now, individual contributors, middle managers, and partner teams carry the burden instead. They are forced to interpret intent, guess priorities, and defend trade-offs that were never explicitly made.

What good clarity looks like

Providing clarity does not mean pretending to have certainty.

It means being explicit about a few things:

• What problem are we solving?
• What outcome do we want?
• What trade-offs are we willing to accept?
• What decision are we making now?
• What would need to be true to revisit it later?

That kind of clarity actually creates better autonomy, not less.

When people understand the purpose, the boundaries, and the trade-offs, they can move independently without constantly reopening the same strategic question.

If you are stepping into leadership

Bring clarity early.

Start from the purpose or end goal. Make the trade-offs visible. Say plainly that we are making trade-offs, because no solution will be perfect.

That last part matters. People do not need perfect plans as much as they need a clear enough direction to act on.

If the leadership above you is not providing clarity

There is only so much you can do, but one useful move is to manage up by framing decisions more clearly for them.

Instead of asking broad open-ended questions, bring sharper choices:

• Should we prioritize option A or B this quarter?
• Are we optimizing for speed, quality, or reversibility here?
• Can you back this migration if we take on these specific trade-offs?

Sometimes leaders struggle less with making decisions than with shaping the decision itself.

Your turn!

Have you worked in an environment where a lack of clarity kept everyone busy but not necessarily aligned? Or have you seen a leader provide the kind of clarity that unlocked momentum for a team? Let me know by replying to this email!

Happy coding!