Monday Myth: “Soft leadership builds strong engineering cultures”

We do not face a leadership crisis as much as a collapse in how leadership gets defined. Somewhere along the way, strength became confused with harshness, while clarity started to resemble control.

The reaction came fast and, in typical fashion, went too far. In trying to soften leadership, organisations stripped away the very element that allows them to function under pressure: decisive, accountable direction.

The Illusion

Across modern organisations, a comfortable belief has taken root. Engagement, drive, and performance would supposedly grow from leaders who remain constantly accommodating, endlessly aligned, and careful not to create tension. The narrative sounds appealing, even progressive. In reality, it quietly replaces effectiveness with appearance.

Performance rarely grows from consensus. It grows from the ability to say no, to make difficult calls, and to carry decisions that not everyone will welcome. Leadership requires choosing what matters, even when that choice creates friction.

Organisations do not optimise for comfort. They optimise for survival and performance. Protecting collective outcomes sometimes demands decisions that do not serve individual preference.

Drive never emerges from comfort. It grows from clarity, visible standards, and direction that leaves little ambiguity about what matters.

What We Forgot

High-performing systems never relied on softness. They relied on discipline, accountability, and a clear understanding of who decides and why. This explains why many of them, including in technology, borrowed principles from military structures. Not for rigidity, but for coherence under pressure.

This influence shows up more often than people admit. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum, came from the US Air Force, while David Packard served in the US Army Signal Corps and later carried forward a culture of discipline and accountability into HP’s early operating model.

The underlying principle mirrors what is often called mission command: clear intent at the top, decentralised execution at the edges, and unmistakable accountability for decisions.

Strong systems do not remove authority. They distribute execution while keeping decision ownership explicit.

That distinction still matters.

The Drift

What replaced that original intent follows a familiar pattern. Leaders position themselves as close to teams, highly empathetic, and constantly aligned, creating the appearance of progress while quietly eroding effectiveness.

This slippage does not remain local to leadership. It propagates. A leader who optimises for popularity introduces structural ambiguity, and that ambiguity replicates at every level. Teams mirror the behaviour: decisions get softened, ownership blurs, and standards become negotiable.

Decisions rarely land with clarity. They stretch, soften, or disappear altogether. Responsibility diffuses across the group until ownership becomes difficult to trace, and phrases such as “let the team decide” shift from principle to protection.

Standards do not collapse in dramatic fashion. They erode gradually, almost invisibly, until very little remains to anchor behaviour.

Leadership then shifts from responsibility to performance. Visibility takes precedence over accountability, and the system continues to operate, but without direction it begins to drift.

The System Cost

Engineering organisations rarely fail because of a lack of talent. Most teams contain more than enough capability to solve the problems in front of them.

Failure follows the moment clarity disappears.

Problems remain unaddressed until they grow teeth. Weak signals pass unnoticed. Difficult conversations move to “later”, often indefinitely. Underperformance lingers, protected by the language of culture.

What follows looks familiar: slower delivery, missed opportunities, revenue left on the table, and a quiet form of disengagement that metrics struggle to capture.

The pattern also leaves external traces. You can often recognise it early:

• companies operating for years while still structurally dependent on investor funding, with little path to operational autonomy
• labels such as “scale-up” or “unicorn” persisting long after repeated layoffs and resets
• an inability to state clear, transparent standards: SLAs, SLOs, ownership, or even basic definitions of success
• metrics that emphasise activity and narrative over delivery and outcomes

These are not branding issues. They signal a system where clarity never fully took hold.

The same pattern appears internally, often more clearly:

• a noticeable absence of drive despite constant activity
• no clear ownership : teams struggle to explain who owns what, or why
• an inability to articulate what the company actually does in simple, operational terms
• reliance on hero culture to compensate for weak systems and unclear structure
• lack of automated protocols for basic operations, leading to manual firefighting
• disproportionate dependency on a few large customers
• rising churn, both in customers and within teams

These signals point to the same root cause: ambiguity at the top, replicated throughout the system.

Culture without standards does not stabilise an organisation. It allows it to drift until pressure exposes the cracks.

Most organisations do not lack talent. They lack the courage to demand it.

The Reality of Leadership

Strong engineering organisations do not emerge from comfort. They require leaders who accept tension as part of the job rather than a failure of it. Saying no becomes more valuable than saying yes. Selecting problem solvers matters more than preserving consensus. Short-term discomfort often protects long-term performance.

None of this calls for authoritarian behaviour. It calls for accountability that remains visible and assumed, especially when decisions carry weight.

Enabling teams without direction does not create autonomy. It creates abandonment.

Where Drive Actually Comes From

Drive does not respond to comfort. It responds to clarity, challenge, and standards that do not move depending on mood or context. People commit when expectations remain explicit and when their work connects to something that progresses.

Strong engineers rarely look for safe environments. They look for places where decisions happen, where progress remains tangible, and where standards create a sense of meaning in the work. In those conditions, a natural form of loyalty emerges, not enforced, but earned through a shared sense of belonging and purpose.

That combination builds energy, not comfort.

The Hard Truth

Leaders who prioritise being liked tend to build organisations that move slowly and decay without noise. Leaders who accept tension, make decisions, and hold the line on standards tend to build organisations that endure.

Not through harshness, but through clarity.

A Note to Engineers

If you recognise these signals early, treat them as data, not noise.

Strong engineers, the ones who solve problems and build systems that endure, should not normalise environments where ambiguity replaces ownership and activity replaces progress.

Choosing where to work remains a strategic decision. When a company cannot articulate what it does, who owns what, or how success is measured, it will not suddenly become a place where your work compounds.

Do not confuse opportunity with exposure.

Avoid organisations that rely on heroics instead of systems, narratives instead of standards, and consensus instead of decisions. Your leverage comes from applying your effort where clarity exists and where it gets reinforced.

In practice, a few focused checks during the hiring process often suffice. Look at the company’s age and trajectory, then ask direct questions: who owns what, how success gets measured, what the SLAs or SLOs are, how decisions get made, and what has changed after recent layoffs or resets. Evasive answers or vague narratives rarely improve once you join.

If they cannot answer clearly in an interview, they will not operate clearly in production.

Not every company deserves your energy.

So

When an organisation starts equating leadership with comfort, engagement becomes a façade rather than a signal.

What grows underneath is fragility.

And fragility does not survive contact with reality.