Growth Lives in the Pause


A five-year-old trying to open a front door can test anyone's patience. The parent has groceries in one hand, a bag in the other, and has just finished a long drive home from work. The child fumbles with the keys, puts them in the wrong way, drops them, tries again. The fastest solution is obvious. Take the keys. Open the door. Walk in. Yet something important is happening in those extra thirty seconds.

I've noticed the same feeling while working with engineers. Sometimes a teammate is struggling through a problem that I know how to solve. I can see the answer. I know the shortcut. I know where the bug is. Part of me wants to take over and finish it. Sometimes I do. Sometimes the situation demands it. Production is broken. A deadline is near. The package needs to get inside the house. Other times, I wait. I let them struggle a little longer. Occasionally I ask another engineer to help, just as a parent might ask an older sibling to open the door. The goal is not the door. The goal is the person learning to open it.

Tenet #2 — Meet People One Step Away from What They Know. Growth rarely happens when we do the work for someone. It rarely happens when we leave them completely alone either. The art is finding the next step they can realistically take and giving them enough room to take it. Sometimes leadership looks like intervention. Sometimes it looks like patience. The challenge is knowing which moment you are in.

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