Mastering Tough Conversations: A Tech Leader’s Guide to 1:1s (That Nobody Really Wants to Lead)

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

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