Engineering Leadership
Excellence is not a curriculum. The gap is.
2026-01-14 · 7 minute read
We keep running the same experiment. Take the strongest engineer on the team. Give them people. Wait. Sometimes it works. Often it produces a tired expert who still writes the critical path at midnight, a team that cannot decide without them, and a manager who thinks they are failing at a personality trait.
They are not. They are being asked to practice a second craft without an apprenticeship. Engineering trains you to reduce ambiguity and be correct. Leadership trains you to act under ambiguity and make other people more correct than they were on Monday.
ELBTG exists because the experiment is expensive. Elevation, learning, building, transforming, and growing are verbs you can put on a calendar. Titles are not a teaching strategy.
If you lead engineers, stop treating the gap as a mystery. Name it. Fund a practice. Measure whether people can ship without the hero.