My first month as a Senior EM was a disaster.
I tried to do everything perfectly. Be in every meeting, review every doc, volunteer for everything. My calendar swelled to 80% meetings. I was drowning in tasks.
But the team wasn’t moving any faster.
I was just a highly-paid admin. A bottleneck.
Busyness is not impact. Your job isn’t to do more work. It’s to multiply your team's impact.
So I got ruthless with my calendar. I started with three hard changes:
- I decline meetings built for information sharing. I ask for a Slack update or a Loom. If it’s not a decision, it’s async.
- I delegate work that can help an engineer grow—even if I can finish it in half the time. This slows me down, but it speeds up the team in the long run. A junior dev ran a retrospective last week. It was rough, but next time she’ll be better.
- I don’t jump in to solve problems. Instead, I ask, “What do you need from me to solve this?” Now, the default is ownership, not dependency.
Your job as a lead is not to clear your own to-do list → It’s to build a team that gets things done without your shadow on every decision.
You become a multiplier when you let go.