Be a gardener, not a mechanic
I've been doing this for twenty years and I still catch myself doing it.
My wife tells me something is wrong. A problem with a friend, a difficult conversation she had, something she can't quite figure out. And within thirty seconds, my brain has already filed it under "solvable problem" and is calculating the root cause.
I want to help. I genuinely do. But I'm already holding a wrench.
The instinct that made you good at tech will fight you here
There is a version of this story that ends well. You find the problem, you fix it, everyone feels better. It happens sometimes.
But what I've learned — slowly, with a lot of evidence to the contrary — is that most of the time, that's not what the other person needed. They didn't need a solution. They needed to be heard. To say the thing out loud to someone who wasn't already calculating the answer.
We are trained by our profession to fix things. That instinct is valuable. It is why systems get shipped, bugs get resolved, architectures hold under load. When something is broken, you find out why, and you make it not broken. Clean loop. Satisfying every time.
Managing people is not a clean loop.
A person is not a system with a root cause you can isolate. A person is twenty, thirty, forty years of accumulated experience — family history, old wounds, quiet ambitions, things they've never said out loud — and they bring all of that into your 1:1 on Thursday afternoon. The issue you're seeing is almost never the issue. It's a symptom of something neither of you can fully see.
The more technically skilled you are, the more this trips you up. Because competence at finding root causes doesn't transfer. And the more you reach for the wrench, the more the other person closes.
Nobody wants to get fixed
Here's the thing nobody says plainly: getting fixed implies being broken. And that admission — even in the safety of a coaching conversation, even with someone you trust — hurts in a way that shuts the door.
People don't want to be fixed. Some can be coached; some can't. But nobody wants to be debugged.
What people actually want is simpler and harder at the same time. They want to be listened to. They want help understanding what they themselves are saying. They want to feel like someone in the room sees them — not the role, not the ticket, not the performance review. Them.
You are not a mechanic.
You are a gardener.
A mechanic diagnoses and fixes. A gardener creates conditions. You can't make anything grow. You can only make growth more or less likely — and then wait, and tolerate not knowing.
The tolerance for not knowing is the actual job. And patience, let's be honest, is not the thing we engineers know best. Hands up who has read the instruction manual before starting to build something. I'm serious. Anyone?
The industry is learning this the wrong way
In May 2026, Brian Armstrong announced a restructuring at Coinbase. The language was interesting: no pure managers, player-coaches, 15 or more direct reports per leader. AI is changing everything, so leaders should stay technical and manage more people at the same time.
I understand the logic. I don't think it works.
Not primarily because of the math — though 15 direct reports is too many for anyone who intends to actually lead rather than coordinate. The deeper problem is that the model treats people management as the smaller, easier part of the player-coach role. The overhead on top of the real work.
It is the opposite.
Managing systems is finite. The bug exists; you find it; you fix it; you go home with a smile. You saved the small world you live in. Managing people is not finite. You might invest months of careful attention in someone and see nothing. Or nothing for two years, then a message that changes how you remember the whole thing. Or never find out at all.
The feedback loops are broken, deferred, or absent. The root cause is often inaccessible — not to you, sometimes not even to the person sitting across from you. And no amount of structured 1:1 templates fixes that.
There is no rollback. Once you have broken a relationship, you cannot reach for the backup and restore it to any point in time. The snapshot doesn't exist. The damage is in production.
What it means to show up as a leader
The shift from mechanic to gardener is not a technique. It's a reorientation.
It starts with listening longer than is comfortable. Even if comfortable, for you, is nine seconds — try it once. Asking a second question before you offer anything. Noticing that what someone says in the first five minutes of a 1:1 is almost never the thing they came to talk about.
It means accepting that your job is not to have the answer. Your job is to be in the room — fully, as a human being, not a role — long enough that the other person can find their own answer.
And it means understanding something that took me embarrassingly long to accept: there is no professional self and a non-professional self. There is just you. Just as there is no quality time with your family — there is just time. The person sitting across from you in that 1:1 is carrying everything they've ever experienced. They didn't leave it at the door. Neither did you.
Both of you might have put on a mask. Beautiful, professional, clean. But under that mask, the makeup is melting, and the heart is squeezing. Freddie Mercury knew it better than anyone:
"Inside my heart is breaking
My make-up may be flaking
But my smile, still, stays on"
— Queen, The Show Must Go On
That is not how you should lead. If you want to be a great leader, you have to be human. Not the performance of a leader. A human being, in a room with another human being, trying to do something that matters.
That is the terrain you are navigating. Not a process. Not a performance framework. A person, in the middle of their life, trying to figure out what to do next.
The fastest way to become a better leader is to stop trying to fix them.