jack marchant

leading by example

June 03, 2026

I listened to a podcast recently with James Cowling on The Peterman Pod and one of the topics James talks about is the concept of leading by example, specifically why you shouldn’t. I’ve been a Tech Lead in one form or another for a while now, and I always valued “Leading by Example” as a principle, all of the leaders I aspired to be did this. At least what I thought it meant. It turns out to be a bit more nuanced than that, there’s more to knowing when to step in and help out the team, and when to step back and let the team escalate if they need to.

In this post I’m going to talk about a few traps I’ve fallen into while trying to lead by example and what I aspire to now with a bit more experience and perspective.

Traps To Avoid

Thinking everyone is watching you

Everyone else is busy with their own work, it actually takes a lot of effort to make people stop what they’re doing and listen to you. People will see the sum of your actions over a larger time window, not things you say in the moment or your daily activities. Instead it’s little snippets of your interactions (direct or indirect) with them.

Always being available to help

Perhaps most detrimental to your own work in the long term, if you keep focussing on being the problem solver, no one else gets to sharpen their skills and share the load. I used to think to be the best I’d have to make sure I’m answering all of the questions for the team, shielding them to do their best work, but actually I was preventing them from rising up and learning themselves.

Fire fighting reduces your overall capacity

Constantly resolving bugs or product issues as they come up reduces the amount of time spent on strategic problems. The big system architecture will never see the light of day if you’re too busy solving problems of today. I feel this has only landed for me recently, where I used to spend time being busy rather than focussing on my impact.

Aspirational Qualities of a Leader

Showing enthusiasm for the problem and the customer

Engineers are notoriously problem solvers, but it takes a great engineer to solve the right problem. There’s nothing that excites me more as an engineer to be focused on solving a problem and seeing it from different angles, understanding the trade offs and making decisions. I believe you can only do this well if you have empathy for the people whose problems you’re attempting to solve.

Showing vulnerability in learning, not by knowing everything

Too often we see leaders as infallible humans who can do no wrong, but the leaders I respect the most, are ones who admit when something went wrong and learn the most from it. 
The architecture you thought was great, turned out not so - change it, understand why and share it with the team so we all learn together.

Being generous with your time

Everyone is busy these days, there’s not enough time to have deep connections with everyone but those with whom you feel you can help and want it, are more deserving of your time spent generously, not spread too thin with low quality connections.

Summary

Leading by example used to mean being available all the time, for anything, solving all the problems faster than anyone else - that’s the behavior I wanted others to emulate. In a lot of ways I resonated with James’ original post on the subject. Now, the example I try to show to others is giving others the room to show their strengths and being more helpful from the sidelines than to jump onto the field with them.