Calm in the storm: From solving problems to holding the room
By cr0ss published on November 28, 2025 in |Leadership|
I read something recently about CTOs that stuck with me. You spend years getting good at engineering problems and the moment you move into a CTO role, the job stops being about those problems. Your first team is no longer your own engineers. It is the people sitting next to you at the leadership table. They are the ones solving problems at the same altitude as you. If you stay buried in engineering details all day, you are either not delegating enough or you are missing strength on your leadership bench. A look at your calendar will tell you which one it is.
Early in my career I would have nodded along to that as an abstract leadership insight and then gone straight back to translating business requirements into architecture diagrams. My comfort zone was always the work itself. Things I could fix with a whiteboard and a plan. Sitting with peers in other functions, listening to their world, understanding why the business actually behaves the way it does, that was slower and messier. It felt less like progress, even when it was exactly the work that needed doing.
My dad would have understood that tension in a very different way. He is a quiet character, careful but not shy. Growing up, one phrase I heard all the time from him was "Don’t count your chickens before they hatch". As a teenager, I misread that completely. I heard caution where he meant patience. I projected my own restlessness into it. Back then, I thought strength meant speed and certainty and being the one with the answer first. I was driven and curious and impatient. I had more energy than perspective. Only much later did I realise what he was actually modelling, probably without thinking about it. A kind of strength that is quiet, present and focused. A strength that does not push but guides. He would listen in a way that made you feel safe. He would help in ways that did not pull the spotlight onto himself. His presence gave other people confidence to find their own direction.
That has reshaped how I think about leadership more than any framework or job title. In corporate environments we talk a lot about clarity and speed and decisiveness. Those things really do matter. You cannot run a business on vibes and gut feeling alone. You have to make calls and communicate in a way that cuts through noise, but none of that works in a sustainable way without presence. You have to grow the muscles to feel when a team is brittle even though it looks fine from the outside.
When I look at that original point about a CTO’s first team, this is what it comes back to for me. The job at that level is less about solving technical puzzles faster than anyone else and more about holding the space where other people can do their best work. That includes your own leadership team in engineering, but it very much includes your peers in product, sales and finance. If you show up to those relationships with the same energy you bring to debugging a system, you will bulldoze right past the moments that actually matter. Presence there means you are willing to sit in tension for a while.
I do not get this right every day. If you asked my partner, she would tell you that whenever I am agitated, I am not getting it right at all and probably she would be right. I still have days where I default to speed, volume and certainty, where my patience is one thread away from snapping. The coop is noisy, the chickens are running around and I am shouting at the weather. On the days when I am more intentional, it looks different. When I am planned instead of frantic. When I remember to look after the coop instead of counting eggs. I listen more. I ask fewer, better questions. I pay attention to how people feel, not just to what they report. Those are the days where I feel closest to the example my dad set, even if the context could not be more different. There is a version of leadership that is all about being the smartest person in the room, winning every argument and always having a plan. It looks impressive on a good day and terrifying on a bad one. The version I am trying to grow into is quieter. It still cares about clarity and speed, but it does not confuse them with shouting and motion.
If the next generation carries even a piece of that into their own lives, I will be proud. Not because they copy what my dad did or what I am trying to do now, but because they have seen that leadership can be strong without being loud, decisive without being brittle, ambitious without trampling over everyone else in the room. And if a few of the future CTOs remember that their first team is not the one they used to manage but the one they now sit alongside, then some of those quiet lessons will have hatched into something real.
From the »Calm in the Storm« series: lessons from leading teams and doing the architecture work for real, where trade-offs aren’t hypothetical and people come first.
