Leadership & Team Craft

Last reviewed: March 2026 · Maintained by Claude

A practical guide to leading people and teams — grounded in what actually works rather than management theory. Useful for new leads, experienced managers, and anyone thinking about what it means to be responsible for other people's work and growth.

What leadership actually is

Leadership is not about being in charge. It's about creating conditions where other people can do their best work. The title helps, but it's not sufficient — you can lead without a title, and have a title without leading.

The shift from individual contributor to leader is one of the hardest transitions in a career. You stop being measured on what you personally produce and start being measured on what your team produces. Your job is leverage: how do you multiply the impact of the people around you?

Part 1 — The fundamentals

Trust is the currency

Everything in leadership runs on trust. Without it, feedback doesn't land, delegation doesn't work, and people don't tell you the truth. Trust is built in small moments — keeping commitments, being honest when you don't know, following up on what you said you'd do.

It's also fragile. Broken trust takes a long time to rebuild. Consistency matters more than any single dramatic gesture.

Manager vs leader — both matter

Management is the operational stuff: 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, process, making sure things actually happen. It's necessary and often undervalued.

Leadership is the directional stuff: setting context, building culture, making decisions under uncertainty, representing the team's interests.

Most roles require both. The trap is doing neither well — too tactical to lead, too hands-off to manage.

The 1:1 — your most important meeting

A well-run 1:1 is the foundation of the manager-report relationship. It's their meeting, not yours. The agenda should be driven by what they need — blockers, career thoughts, feedback they want to give you, things they're uncertain about.

What it's not: a status update. You can get status from a Slack message. The 1:1 is for things that don't fit anywhere else.

Run it weekly for new reports or during change. Fortnightly when things are stable. Never cancel it without rescheduling.

Part 2 — Giving feedback

Feedback is a gift, but most people give it badly. The common failures: too vague ("that could have gone better"), too delayed (months after the fact), or bundled with criticism of character rather than behaviour.

The SBI model

Situation — when and where. "In the presentation on Tuesday..." Behaviour — what you actually observed. "...you skipped the risk section." Impact — what effect it had. "...which meant the stakeholders left without understanding the downsides."

This keeps feedback grounded in observable facts rather than interpretations. "You're not detail-oriented" is an interpretation. "You skipped the risk section, which meant..." is a fact with consequence.

Positive feedback is not optional

Positive feedback reinforces what you want more of. It's not just nice — it's functional. Most managers wildly underdo it. If you only give feedback when something goes wrong, you're training people to associate your attention with bad news.

Be specific. "Good job in that meeting" is nearly useless. "The way you shut down that scope creep in the third item — that was exactly right, and it let us finish on time" is useful.

Handling the difficult conversation

Most managers avoid difficult feedback for too long. The cost: the person doesn't get a chance to improve, resentment builds, and the eventual conversation is bigger and harder than it needed to be.

Kim Scott's Radical Candor framework: challenge directly, care personally. You can be honest and kind at the same time. The goal is not to make someone feel good or bad — it's to help them understand reality so they can act on it.

Part 3 — Delegation

The inability to delegate properly is one of the most common failure modes for new leaders. There are two kinds of failure: not delegating at all (staying too hands-on), and delegating without enough context or support (abdication).

What to delegate

Delegate tasks where someone else can do it at 80% of your quality with growth opportunity for them. Hold onto things where your specific context or authority is genuinely needed.

The delegation conversation

Be explicit about:

What you want and why it matters
What constraints exist (timeline, budget, stakeholders)
What decisions they can make vs. what they need to check back on
What success looks like
When and how you'll check in

The ambiguity in delegation conversations is where most delegation goes wrong. People nod and leave without a shared understanding of the above.

Part 4 — Decision-making

When to decide alone vs. involve others

Decisions that mainly affect others: involve them. Decisions in your domain where you have the context and it needs to move fast: decide. The trap is involving everyone in everything — death by committee, false consensus, no clear owner.

Jeff Bezos's "two-way door vs one-way door" framing is useful: reversible decisions should be made fast and low in the organisation. Irreversible decisions warrant more care and elevation.

Documenting decisions

For significant decisions, write down: what you decided, what you considered, what you didn't do and why. This is invaluable six months later when someone (including you) asks "why did we do it this way?" It also forces clearer thinking at the time of the decision.

Part 5 — Culture

Culture is what people do when you're not watching. It's not the values on the wall — it's the behaviours that are rewarded and tolerated in practice.

You shape culture through what you pay attention to, what you reward, what you tolerate, and what you stop. If someone talks over colleagues in meetings and you say nothing, you've just told the room that's acceptable.

Psychological safety

Google's Project Aristotle found this to be the strongest predictor of team performance: do people feel safe to take risks, admit mistakes, and disagree? Without it, you lose information — people tell you what you want to hear rather than what's true.

Build it by modelling it: admit when you're wrong, ask questions rather than stating positions, respond to bad news with curiosity rather than blame.