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You’ve just been promoted. The title changed from Senior Developer to Engineering Manager, from Tech Lead to Director of Technology. Congratulations—you’ve worked hard for this moment. But then reality hits. Your inbox explodes. Slack messages pile up faster than you can read them. You’re pulled into meeting after meeting. Your calendar looks like a game of Tetris gone wrong. And that code you used to write? That deep work you loved? It’s now squeezed into whatever gaps remain between 1:1s, stand-ups, stakeholder updates, and strategic planning sessions. Welcome to the number one struggle every brand-new leader in technology faces: Communication overload. The Hidden Cost of Being “Always On” Here’s what nobody tells you when you step into leadership: Your job has fundamentally transformed from creating solutions to constant communication. And the data confirms this shift is real—and overwhelming. According to Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication Report, developed with The Harris Poll, knowledge workers now spend 88% of their workweek communicating. For new tech leaders juggling team management, cross-functional collaboration, and strategic initiatives, that percentage often exceeds 100% of a standard work week. The report reveals something even more alarming: in the past 12 months, 78% of professionals saw increases in communication frequency, while 73% are using more communication channels than ever before. For HR teams and large organizations—exactly where many new tech leaders find themselves—many report spending over 40 hours weekly on communication alone. Think about that for a moment. Communication isn’t just part of the job anymore. Communication is the job. Why New Tech Leaders Feel it Most Intensely? As someone who works with hundreds of tech leaders each year through workshops and one-on-one mentoring, I see this pattern repeatedly. New leaders get caught in what I call the “triple communication trap”: You haven’t let go of your Individual Contributor identity. You were promoted because you were exceptional at solving technical problems. Your brain is wired to think in code, systems, and architecture. But now, your value comes from enabling others to do that work. This identity shift is brutal, and most new leaders try to do both—leading AND coding—which doubles their communication load while halving their effectiveness at each. You lack Communication Intelligence (CQ). We invest heavily in developing technical skills—learning new frameworks, mastering cloud architectures, and understanding AI/ML pipelines. But communication? We assume it’s intuitive. It’s not. Just as you wouldn’t expect someone to write production-ready code without training, you can’t expect leaders to navigate complex human dynamics without developing their Communication Intelligence. As I explored in the article on Communication Debt, many organizations suffer from a severe lack of investment in communication processes. New leaders inherit this debt without realizing it, then struggle to understand why their teams seem disengaged or why projects constantly fail due to “miscommunication.” You’re drowning in channels without a strategy. Email. Slack. Teams. Zoom. Jira. Confluence. GitHub comments. The average tech leader toggles between 8-10 communication platforms daily. Research shows that 55% of professionals say the constant flow of notifications across channels makes it hard to concentrate on important tasks, and 47% feel unsure about selecting the right channel to communicate information. Without a clear communication strategy, new leaders respond reactively to whatever channel screams loudest, creating a perpetual state of context-switching that destroys productivity and cognitive capacity. The Real Price We Pay The communication crisis in tech leadership isn’t just about feeling busy. It has a measurable business impact. Grammarly’s research found that poor communication costs businesses $1.2 trillion annually through lost productivity, elevated turnover, and customer churn. For a single organization, business leaders estimate teams lose 7.47 hours weekly to poor communication, equating to $12,506 per employee yearly. But here’s what hits new leaders hardest: This isn’t about others failing to communicate well. It’s about you learning to communicate strategically as a leader. And nobody taught you how. The consequences compound quickly: Your team becomes disengaged because they’re unclear about priorities and expectations Projects slip because cross-functional alignment fails Top performers leave citing a lack of clarity and direction You burn out trying to be everywhere, for everyone, all the time According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 Report, only one in three employees is engaged at work, and burnout continues to rise. New leaders, trying to prove themselves while learning their role, often push themselves beyond sustainable limits. Two Strategies to Navigate Communication Overload After working with tech leaders across organizations ranging from startups to global enterprises, I’ve identified four core strategies that make the difference between drowning and thriving. #1 Contract and Re-Contract Constantly Most new leaders assume their team knows what’s expected. They don’t. The contract you think you have—about goals, responsibilities, communication norms—exists only in your head. I teach leaders to avoid the toxic questions “Do you have any questions?” and “Is everything clear?” These prompts trigger social pressure to say “yes” even when confusion reigns. Instead, try: “I want to check if I explained this clearly. Can you describe back to me how you understood this?” This simple shift transforms an assumption into confirmation. Do this weekly with your team. When circumstances change (and in tech, they always do), re-contract explicitly rather than making unilateral announcements. #2 Develop Your Communication Intelligence (CQ) Just as you learned technical skills through deliberate practice, you must develop CQ intentionally. This means: Understanding that different people need information delivered in different ways Learning to read behavioral cues that signal misunderstanding or disengagement Recognizing your own communication preferences and consciously stretching beyond them Investing 10-15 seconds at the start of each interaction to observe how the other person communicates, then tailoring your approach Most communication is tailored to ourselves, not to others. We like detailed written documentation, so we send 10-page specs. We prefer face-to-face conversation, so we schedule yet another meeting. Strategic leaders adapt their communication to what works for their audience, not what’s comfortable for them. One CEO I worked with replaced weekly status meetings with short “mission huddles” focused on priorities and

To have a greater impact as leaders, we need to be more visible. I know that you would prefer the scenario: “Who needs to know, they know” or “Our product is going to speak for itself”, but the truth is that getting people know about what you do is something that’s not just happening. We need to speak up about our ideas, about what we’ve done, what we’ve designed, what we want to change, or what we’ve changed already, because nobody’s going to notice that on their own. Nobody’s going to guess that it is important, to assume that it’s somehow valuable. Harsh, but true. So today I want to focus on what we can do in practice to build more visibility. I’m going to share with you some of my own strategies, so you can just take, copy, and paste them, adding a little bit more flavour to your individual situation. We are going to divide those things into internal and external leadership visibility strategies.     How to Build Visibility Inside the Organization?   If you’re working in the organization: It can be a big organization / a corporate world, or in a smaller organization, but you are inside, what can you do to build your visibility? First, you have your team level. I’m sure that you have some team meetings, knowledge sharing sessions, weekly meetings, retrospectives; depends on the setup that you are working in. These are the places that are already designed for you to share knowledge, experiences, lessons, mistakes, or failures (with lessons learned) that you can show to others. When you speak up, this is always something that makes you more visible. So even if you’re a Base Imaginer, Base Thinker who has the preference to not speak up very much, I would like you to challenge yourself a little bit to be more verbal. I know that you believe that if you work hard in silence, you create valuable solutions to the problems the organization or clients face, the other people will notice you. I don’t want to be a dream-crusher here, but it’s just not going to happen. People are very focused on their own things and don’t have much spare energy to look around. You need to show them. So, I invite you to do one thing like that per week, in a bi-weekly meeting, or once per month. Start small: The goal is for your brain to see that it makes sense and is worth the stretch. Share something that you’ve created, optimised, or automated recently.  Don’t make it complicated, just use what you’re already doing in your work. The second thing you can do is to share knowledge by sending some links to the podcast episodes that were interesting for you to others, a book you’ve read, a YouTube video you watched, or a digital course you’ve taken. I’m sure that you have some Teams / Slack / WhatsApp group in your company where you share some stuff. Leverage that: Share links to YouTube videos, to TED Talks, to podcasts, to books, to articles, to documentation, to Reddit, basically anything that you’re using to get knowledge. Share that with others with a short comment like: Hey! I’m sharing this as something interesting…, It helped me in a way that…, Check it out!”. Easy. You don’t even need to speak up verbally; you just copy and paste a link. But again, it puts you on the map that you share things with others. That way, you can become a go-to person for people who are looking for a certain answer or a source of knowledge. Being a go-to person builds visibility. Start with the team level and then move up. What can you do on the organizational level? Be the voice. The voice of the change or a project. Engage yourself in the project or initiative team, even if there is some extra work to do. You can always make a contract with your boss to be redirected when it comes to your work to a little bit to some project that is maybe like a matrix project in the organization. Maybe this is something different. Maybe this is something that you never done before. Being more visible by creating value is one of the most important things in organizations. The good news? It is not about speaking up all the time. It’s about being visible by being engaged. Of course, you can make some presentations, being a face of the project or initiative, during the Town Hall meeting, some other online or onsite gatherings. Even better! Check out what kind of possibilities there are in your organization that you can leverage. Be a mentor or a buddy for new joiners, or let others shadow you. There are more things you can do than you think. Choose what works for you, start with one thing, and then move to another one if you want.   How to Build Visibility Outside the Organization?   If you are outside of the organization: Maybe you are a consultant / a Fractional CTO / COO, etc.; if you are running your own business: you’re an entrepreneur, a Founder, you can do many things. And if you’re inside the organization, you can use some of those as well (these strategies are not reserved only for “the externals”). First, blogging. You can say that blogging is dead, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. People like to read, especially short forms. Because if you are a visual person, what you read sticks in your brain. So, blogging can be your visibility builder, especially when you take care of the SEO. It can be very well-positioned in Google and in AI tools where people are researching things. It is super easy and low-cost to start. Just start writing down what you know about. Share your expertise, research, pieces of lessons that you have, failures, and success stories. People love reading about those things. The second

Communication Intelligence is always first about understanding what we do. And there’s one skill in there that a lot of Tech Leaders are not treating with respect. Not a lot of them focus on that one, and it costs a lot. I’m talking about the listening skills. When I was doing the research for the book that I’m going release soon, I was thinking about different angles of CQ. All of the algorithms that people are using consciously or mostly unconsciously when communicating with other people, especially when being leaders. And there are so many courses, books, podcast episodes, articles, YouTube videos, and TED Talks about speaking, public speaking, or speaking to others. But it dawned on me that there are not a lot of courses and other sources of knowledge about listening. And I’ve started to wonder why that is. I think it is because we think that listening is so easy. You just need to sit and listen, right? Nothing further from the truth. To make a little mindset and skillset shift in this area, today I’ve decided to give you 4 types of listening and some active listening tools and techniques for tech leaders. Let’s dig in! 4 Types of Listening There are 4 types of listening that tell us more about our intrinsic, mostly unconscious motivations: Why do we even go into the conversation with other people? Listen to reply. This is what most of the people do. We listen only to make a moment for ourselves to tell something. We are not listening for other reasons. And if we have this habit of not interrupting, we just cannot wait to jump in and say something. Most of the time, for us is to share information. So, saying what we know, what we have in our brains. We are not there to do anything more than reply. Listen to understand. In this type, people paraphrase, they ask additional questions; they can tell something like: “OK, this is interesting; tell me more.” They can say something with their own words, like: “OK, so I understand from what you’re saying that… Is that correct?” It is to understand, without guessing. Listen to connect. When people want to connect with us, they go deeper. They talk about something important for them, and they share reflections, opinions, values, thoughts, or emotions. They want to connect and find something meaningful for both sides. So, they ask more, they are more attentive, they’re curious about the other person, with an intention to build a relationship (regardless of the context). Listen to co-create. I’m listening to you to create something together, to make some value, to create a solution, to solve a problem, to create a functionality together, or to make a change. We are co-creating something, building a thing that can be valuable or useful for other people. So, I’m listening to what you’re saying, you’re listening to what I’m saying, and we make the synergy from those two things to create something together. Statistically, most people are listening only to reply. Secondly, they listen to understand. Then they listen to connect with some, and very few listen to co-create. The question is: Why is it happening in that order? From my observations and experiences with different leaders, teams, and organizations, it happens because of the way we work and the pressure we have (external and internal). So, my advice for you here is to just reflect on what you do. Next time, when you are going to have a conversation with somebody, just be more aware of how you respond to them and what you’re doing. What do you have in your brain? What is your priority for the conversation? What is the goal of the conversation? It can be private, and it can be professional (maybe private even is going to be more insightful). If you’re only talking, talking, talking, talking to vomit information on the other… Make a pause and observe: “Hey, I’m doing it. How can I be in a different bucket, more curious about the other person, more attentive to what they’re saying, more observant of them?”. Start with that small step, notice the difference. And how to do it? Here’s a list of simple techniques to strengthen your listening leadership muscle. Active Listening Techniques for Tech Leaders   #1 Paraphrasing It’s literally repeating what the other person said with a few different words. It’s the simplest tool to check if you got what was told, not assuming that you did. You can start with: “What I’m hearing is…” or “From what you say, I understand that…”. Facts, not opinions. Even if you are a Base Persister, you need to stick to the information without using much of your own frame of reference. Paraphrasing is for you to confirm understanding and de-escalate any misunderstandings that can appear during the conversation. #2 Asking open-ended questions This is the one that a lot of people struggle with. What I observed over the years of working with people from different cultures, it differs from culture to culture. Some countries have a preference to ask closed-ended questions to maintain harmony and avoid confrontation (i.e., Poland, Japan, Korea, Latin America, India). And some of them ask more open-ended questions to drive clarity and efficiency in discussions (i.e., USA, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Arab countries). Asking closed-ended questions is fine if you want to get a straight, yes/no answer. But especially during workshops when we train with leaders on how to give feedback or just use the requestive PCM® channel, it appears how often they use this type of question by coincidence, purely unconsciously. And they’re so surprised that they don’t get the answer they aim for: Especially when they ask a closed-ended question with negation inside (i.e., “Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”). Open-ended questions directed to the Base Thinker or Persister will open a whole new conversation. You can get to know so much, only from changing one piece of

Are you feeling sick to your stomach on Sunday afternoon when you think about starting work on Monday? Or maybe you are under constant stress and pressure of not delivering everything you have on your task list? Not being up to date with everything that’s changing in the Tech world? Do you have moments of energy so low that you don’t even want to get out of bed to start working? If you said “YES” to at least one of the above, it might mean that you’re in the middle of burnout. A lack of power, energy, intrinsic motivation, and engagement to do things at work. Why is burnout a new pandemic, especially in the tech world? I see so many leaders, startup Founders and team members who are experiencing that state than I can count. That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the subject and give you 2 things: The root cause analyses and some solutions that you can take and implement. So, if you are this person or you know somebody who is in the burnout zone, keep reading.   Burnout Root Cause No. 1: Stretching Too Much   The first root cause of burnout is staying in the stretch zone too much. In the article about OKRs, I gave you 4 zones of efficiency and growth: Bored, Comfort, Stretch, and Burnout Zone. When we are in the Comfort Zone too much, there’s no growth, and we can go into the Bored Zone. When we are in the Stretch Zone too much, we can go into the Burnout Zone. If you put yourself under too much pressure, you want to learn too much in a super short period of time, if you take on responsibilities that you’re not ready for or prepared to… You can go into burnout very easily. So, the question is: Do you push yourself too hard? Do you demand of yourself the things that you’re not so demanding about when it comes to others? And don’t get me wrong here. I’m a demanding person. I push myself every single day, but it costs a lot. And I’ve learned it the hard way because I pushed myself and then pushed myself and then I got sick. So, it was the wakeup call for me: To take care of my health and get my priorities straight. Do I still have moments of exhaustion? Sure, I have. But I also know that the best way is to move from Comfort to Stretch Zone in balance to prevent burnout. Diluted focus gives you diluted results. Always. The burnout among IT professionals, leaders, C-level people, Founders, and Co-founders in the startup setup is well-documented and a growing issue. So, it’s not like it wasn’t visible in the past, and it appeared like today. It’s growing, and it’s a lot of research, a lot of studies about this issue.   Burnout Root Cause No. 2: Excessive Workload   Another root cause is excessive workload and working long hours. Of course. Especially when you are a Founder or Co-founder, when you are building your business from scratch. But it should be a phase, not a day-to-day reality until the rest of your life. So, we have heavy workloads and frequent overtime. When you work as a highly responsible person (the higher position in the org chart, the more responsibilities you have), there’s a pattern of an expectation, mostly unspoken, to be constantly available. It’s also attached to the SME level; it seems like everybody experiences it. And we have numbers to show us how much it cost. The research of the ISACA Tech Workplace and Culture survey from March 2025 shows that 54 % of IT professionals have heavy workloads, and 43 % point to long hours as the primary drivers of burnout. We have more. The same research is talking about tight deadlines, 41% respondents say that they lack resources, 41 % underlines unsupportive management, also 41% the lack of appreciation.   Burnout Root Cause No. 3: Constant High Pressure   Another bucket of the burnout root causes in tech is high pressure work environment. When you work in a startup environment, it is super high-pressure because we are going for the next round of investment, or maybe we have a VC on board, and they require results because they invested and they want to get the money back. There’s always going to be pressure when it comes to money, startup setup or the corporate world. But we also have a high pressure of an expectation for innovation and rapid delivery. Because the world is shifting, and technology is changing so fast that it’s like being on a mission all the time. Tight deadlines, high expectations. Constant misery of the business because they’re not happy with the deadlines, with the functionalities that we deliver.   Burnout Root Cause No. 4: Continuous Learning Demand   In connection with that, the next part is the rapid technological change in continuous learning demand. So, it adds up to the pressure as well, because we need to continually update skills, especially Subject Matter Experts, engineers, and leaders. We like it or not, we cannot know everything. And I know that a lot of Thinkers are not on board with me on that one, but it is impossible to be up to date with everything. But a lot of professionals are overwhelmed by the pressure to learn new tools and practices while managing the existing responsibilities, tasks, projects, and initiatives, because it is like having two jobs. So, one, my day job is to keep the machine running, and the next job, the second part of it, is to keep up. And it can be a cause of burnout because it’s impossible. After all, it’s a never-ending story. It’s impossible to know everything.   Burnout Root Cause No. 5: Work-Life Imbalance   The next one is work-life imbalance and blurred boundaries. So, it is a shift, and I think it started

Great resignation. Employee market. Huge employee gap. The lowest unemployment rate in years. We see and hear all of that, now maybe even more than ever. Labor market shifts on its own, as well as many organizations needs to rethink how they operate on a daily basis. Regarding their cost and organizational structure, strategy, focus, goals and leadership condition. And while some of them deal with necessary lay-offs, some have quite the opposite challenge: their (mostly) the best employees quit and take another job externally. Taking into consideration few different studies, approximately 40% of employees think about or act towards a job change. It’s a huge number of people in the organization that for some reasons started to lose or lost their engagement in a current place. What is in top 5 reasons employees quit their jobs? Poor management is in top 10 as well, don’t worry. Covid time changed the order a little bit, point 4 and 5 are connected directly to the situation during and post pandemic. More about that further in the article. So taking all that into consideration – what you can do as a manager so your people don’t quit? Here are 5 things I believe are the most valuable for you and for your people, regardless of the branch, sector, size of the company or space that you work in. 1. Use TRS (Total Reward Statement) before they quit Nobody teaches managers how to talk about money. We talk about feedback, goal setting, delegating tasks, strategy, team building etc., but when we think about money issues, discussing raises, levels of bonuses we get uncomfortable. It’s connected to two main things. 1. Money is a taboo in a certain culture/country – it’s rude to talk about it openly. 2. We don’t know how to talk about money, especially when we know that there is no space to offer a raise or any additional bonus, so we procrastinate the conversation. So I say it’s about the time that we start talking about money as openly as about any other aspect of work. And you as a manager can learn how to lead a conversation around it, it’s a competence like any other one. Total Reward Statement (TRS) is a tool that you can use to talk about money-related subjects with your employees. Most of the time we don’t count everything that employer gives us, we only see the amount of money that appears on our bank account once a month. And in most of the cases it’s so much more than that. By using that you can show your employee what (on a monthly/quarterly or yearly basis) is the total investment in them that organization makes. What else can we show in TRS, besides of a basic salary? When you make a sum of everything that a certain employee uses (approximately, it’s not about counting every single dollar that organization spend on one person), the conversation around money might starts to look differently. Our employees often don’t see the bigger picture and don’t understand the scale of money that is invested in them. Of course if the organization pays under the market, it’s another story – the question is if you as a manager has any influence to address the pay gap in your team. If yes – do it, as soon as possible to minimize the risk of your people quit in the nearest future. If no – think what other elements in TRS you can use to fill it somehow until the times are better.  2. Co-create career path with your employee The second one on the list of arguments why people quit is a lack of development opportunities. I hear it a lot. Sometimes this reason is true, but in many cases it’s just an excuse or a lack of knowledge. The first question I ask every single time when somebody comes to me and tells that there are no opportunities for them to grow in this company is: “what did you already try?”. This question appears as such a strong one that sometimes people don’t know how to answer. They start with: “I tried everything!”. So we talk about what this “everything” means to them. Very often it appears that they didn’t do anything in particular, 80% of the cases didn’t even have a quality conversation with their manager about it! It’s insane. They didn’t start it and their manager didn’t start it either. Nobody says anything, counting on that the other side WILL GUESS what is at need at the moment. Bs, it’s not going to happen. So if you are a manager – it’s your job to trigger the conversation about development of your employee. Of course I advise to have a co-creation partnership during the process, not following the idea that you are going to make a plan that your employee will follow. It’s not that engaging when we compare it to actually working together. Quick question: when was the last time you talked with your employee(s) about their professional/personal development? Answer honestly, no one’s judging you. First step of every growth is self-awareness. Plan the space to talk about it, on a regular basis. Ask your employee how often do they need to talk about it, make check points. Don’t guess, don’t assume. Ask questions, listen and be adaptive. Share responsibilities – don’t take everything on your back. The owner of personal development is an employee, always. When they decide to leave the organization, their growth goes with them. It doesn’t belong to you, or the firm. It’s important to say it out loud, to cut the unhealthy and unrealistic expectations. Be honest and transparent about what is possible and what not (at the moment), avoid being cruel though (some managers like to use the “tough love” tool). Our intention is not to scare a person away form taking the responsibility. Our goal should be to encourage them, show them the way, guide them, give feedback on