Make Leaders Lab Again!
Why technical leadership without hands-on context is a risk—no matter how good your strategy decks are.
I’m not saying every exec should be hacking YAML at midnight.
But if you’ve stopped building altogether… there’s a good chance you’re leading from the wrong altitude.
Let me explain.
From VMware to AI: What the Lab Taught Me
I’ve been in tech long enough to remember when the lab was the strategy room.
Back then, we didn’t have AI copilots or slick walkthroughs. Just trial, error, and 3AM VMware installs that crashed halfway through because of a misconfigured NIC.
It wasn’t glamorous. It was essential.
Because that’s where you learned how systems actually behaved under pressure—not just how they looked in a slide deck.
Fast-forward to today: I’ve been getting my hands dirty with AI tooling, which is awakening a muscle memory I didn’t realize I’d neglected.
Hands-On Work Sharpens High-Level Thinking
Here’s the truth most leadership circles avoid:
Nothing sharpens strategy like doing the technical work yourself.
It’s one thing to hear a team say “integration is messy.” It’s another to see how your supposedly “simple abstraction” breaks when two APIs disagree on the meaning of a timestamp.
When you stop building, you lose sight of the friction your teams are navigating.
And in tech, friction is what kills momentum.
When Leaders Drift Too High
The higher up you go, the more abstract your reality becomes:
Roadmaps instead of runbooks
Metrics instead of monitors
Personas instead of people
But tech is still built by humans, on systems, with all the messiness that implies.
The further you drift from the work, the more you risk building castles in the clouds—strategies disconnected from execution.
Lab as Empathy Engine
This isn’t a nostalgia play. I’m not romanticizing lab time for the sake of it.
This is about empathy-based leadership.
When you lab—when you troubleshoot, configure, build—you step back into the shoes of the people doing the work. You remember what’s actually hard. What’s brittle. What’s still duct-taped behind the scenes.
That insight? It’s priceless.
Because it’s what keeps you from asking your teams to “just automate it” when the automation tool is the thing that’s broken.
You Don’t Have to Be the Engineer—But You Need to Care Like One
I’m not suggesting you become the primary builder again. That’s not scalable.
But leadership doesn’t mean detachment. And credibility doesn’t come from title—it comes from context.
Want to lead well? Step into the lab once in a while.
Watch how the tech feels—not just how it demos.
When Was the Last Time You Got Hands-On?
If you’ve built something recently—wrestled with a tool, explored a new platform, debugged an issue—it probably gave you more clarity than a dozen meetings ever could.
And if you haven’t?
Maybe it’s time.
Because in the end, the lab isn’t just where we learn tech.
It’s where we reconnect with the people and problems we’re trying to solve for.
That’s where leadership begins.
💬 I’d love to hear:
When was the last time you went hands-on? Did it change how you think?
👇 Drop your thoughts or hit reply—I read everything.