Let me say something that might be uncomfortable.
Most leaders in technology are technically brilliant. They can architect complex systems, debug code at 2 AM, and talk about infrastructure trade-offs for hours. But when it comes to actually leading people? Many of them are, frankly, terrible at it.
Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re bad humans. But because nobody ever taught them how.
And the numbers back this up. 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their objectives, and according to research from McKinsey and others, the #1 reason isn’t budget, technology, or strategy. It’s people leadership.
So let’s talk about it. Here are three reasons tech leaders suck at their jobs, and what to actually do differently.
Reason #1: They Were Promoted for Being Great Coders, Not Great Leaders
This is the original sin of tech leadership.
You were exceptional at your job. You shipped fast. Your code was clean. Your solutions were elegant. So the organisation did what organisations do: they promoted you. Congratulations. Now you manage people.
The problem? Nobody prepared you for that shift.
In Deloitte’s Global Technology Leadership Study, tech executives ranked non-technical skills (leadership, problem-solving, relationship-building, creative thinking) as the most critical competencies for future success. Not coding. Not architecture. People skills.
Yet here’s what actually happens: you get the title, the salary bump, and… zero leadership training. You learn by making mistakes. With real humans. Who is watching.
I call this the Technocrat Trap. You fall back on what you know: solving technical problems. You stay too deep in the code. You over-engineer processes. You micromanage the architecture review because it’s easier than navigating why two senior engineers haven’t spoken to each other in three months.
The shift from individual contributor to leader requires rewiring how you think about value. Your job is no longer to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to make the room smarter.
What to do instead: Stop measuring your own output and start measuring your team’s. Every week, ask yourself: “What did I unblock? What clarity did I create? Who did I help grow?” Those are your real KPIs now. Read The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo: it’s the most honest account I’ve found of what this transition actually feels like.
Reason #2: They Confuse Busyness with Leadership
Here’s a question I ask every tech leader I work with: “When was the last time you had a real conversation with someone on your team? Not a status update. Not a sprint review. A real conversation about how they’re doing, what they need, what’s getting in their way?”
Most of them pause. Then they say something like: “I’m in back-to-back meetings all day, I don’t have time for that.”
And that’s exactly the problem.
Research from Grammarly and The Harris Poll found that knowledge workers spend 88% of their workweek communicating. For tech leaders, that often means more than 40 hours weekly just on communication. But (and this is the brutal part) volume doesn’t equal quality.
You can be in 10 meetings a day and still have a team that has no idea what’s expected of them. You can send 50 Slack messages and still leave your people feeling invisible.
Poor communication costs businesses $1.2 trillion annually in lost productivity and turnover. For a single organisation, teams lose an average of 7.47 hours weekly to miscommunication alone. That’s almost a full workday. Every week. Per person.
The leaders I coach are almost always busy. But busyness is not leadership. It’s a defence mechanism.
When you’re constantly in reactive mode (putting out fires, jumping between Jira and Slack and email and Teams) you don’t have to sit with the harder questions: Do my people feel safe to speak up? Does my team understand where we’re going and why? Am I creating clarity or just noise?
I write about this in detail in the article “What Does a Communication Debt Really Cost Us?”, because the debt accumulates silently, and by the time you notice it, people are already disengaged or out the door.
What to do instead: Protect one hour a week for what I call Intentional Leadership Time. Not deep work. Not email. Time specifically for conversations, feedback, and reflection. Start with your 1:1s. Make them about the person, not the project. Ask: “What’s one thing I could do differently that would make your work easier?” Then actually listen to the answer. For more on why listening is the leadership skill nobody talks about, read this article on the blog.
Reason #3: They Treat Everyone the Same, and Call It Fairness
This one is subtle. And it’s the one that makes even experienced leaders defensive.
“I treat everyone equally.”
I hear this all the time. And I understand the intention behind it. But there’s a difference between treating people fairly and treating them identically. One is leadership. The other is a shortcut.
Here’s the reality: your team is not made of clones. Each person on it processes information differently, is motivated by different things, and needs something different from you to do their best work.
When you give the same feedback the same way to everyone, you’re not being fair. You’re being lazy. And you’re probably losing half the room every time.
One person needs direct, structured feedback with clear action points. Another needs to feel heard before they can even receive feedback. A third needs time to process independently before they can respond. If you’re using the same script for all three, your best-case scenario is a 33% hit rate.
In fact, 63% of employees cite poor communication from leadership as a primary reason for leaving their jobs (Zenger Folkman, 2024). Not a bad strategy. Not low salaries. Communication.
This is exactly what the Process Communication Model® addresses. PCM is a research-backed framework that identifies six personality Base types (Thinker, Harmonizer, Rebel, Imaginer, Promoter, and Persister), each with distinct communication needs, motivational drivers, and stress behaviours.
Understanding which type you’re talking to changes everything. The Base Thinker on your team needs logic, structure, and recognition for their competence. The Base Harmonizer needs warmth, connection, and to know they matter as a person, not just a resource. The Base Rebel needs playfulness, creativity, and a sense of fun in the work.
When you communicate in a way that doesn’t match someone’s type, you’re not being clear. You’re speaking a language they’re not wired to receive.
For a deep dive into the Base Thinker type specifically (the most common in tech teams), read this article on the blog.
What to do instead: Start paying attention. Not to what people say, but how they say it. Notice who asks for context before they answer. Notice who gets quiet under pressure vs. who gets loud. Notice who needs encouragement and who needs space. That awareness is the beginning of Communication Intelligence (CQ), the skill that separates leaders who retain great people from those who wonder why great people keep leaving.
So, What’s the Common Thread?
All three of these reasons come down to the same thing: tech leaders are incredibly well-trained in the hard skills of their domain and radically underprepared for the human side of leadership.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s a systemic gap.
But it is your responsibility to close it.
Because only 1 in 3 employees is engaged at work globally (Gallup, 2024). And leadership communication accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. If your team is disengaged, there’s a very good chance the problem starts with you, not them.
That’s a confronting thing to hear. But it’s also the most empowering thing I know: because if you’re the problem, you can also be the solution.
So here’s my closing question for you:
If your team rated you as a leader today (not on your technical skills, but on how well you communicate, how clearly you lead, and how well you understand what each person needs), what score would you get?
And more importantly: what are you going to do about it?
Want to go deeper? If you’re ready to invest in the leadership skills that actually move teams forward, start with the Leman Leadership Pulse: weekly insights on tech leadership, communication, and building teams that actually work. Or check out the 5 Biggest Leadership Feedback Mistakes, because if you’re not giving feedback well, none of the rest of this matters.
