Leadership Lessons: On Context & Control

I took on my first leadership roles about two years ago, but I didn't really have anyone around me who could teach me how to be a manager.

To be honest, I never really wanted to become a manager. The only problem is that I had goals for the team that were bigger than what I could ever achieve alone. Somewhere along the way, I realised that getting there meant learning to scale myself: letting go parts of the work, trusting other people with responsibility, and helping them succeed in a way that still moved the team towards the same mission.

I had so many questions. Who do you trust, in your team, and to work with your team? How do you enable someone without micromanaging them? What processes actually help? What kind of culture makes this possible? And what do I need to change about myself?

When I looked around, I saw many managers struggling with the same questions, even if they were not aware of it. Some managers were great ICs and controlled every fine detail in their teams, whilst others were so far removed from the work that they could no longer offer much useful guidance. Some were kind but ineffective, while others got results while leaving the team members afraid to make even a single mistake.

Looking around me, I quickly discovered the extreme archetypes, and knew that the answer had to lie somewhere in between. I was also convinced that some of these extremes of leadership were false trade-offs that managers often preached in order to justify their tendencies.

One day, I came across the Netflix culture deck, and it fundamentally changed me as a person, team player and a leader.

Since then, I've re-read it countless times as a reminder, and a lot of it has stuck with me as I define my own leadership. But one principle in particular became the foundation of how I think about leadership and management, and it has all to do with context and control.

Before we get into it, there's a saying that I learnt over the years, and I've found it to be truer with each passing day of my career. It goes something like this:

Good workers don't quit bad companies, they quit bad managers.

And because many modern workplaces don't have a good process to train managers (who are often thrusted into these positions for their own excellent IC capabilities), culture suffers as a result because the demands of the job are so different. More so than most leaders themselves realise, and so many new leaders and managers are set up to fail. The leaders of today need to think much harder about how to select and groom the next generation of leaders.

Of course, I am still new to all of this myself, and down the road, I am quite sure that I will change my mind about what I've said today. So I keep an open mind about what works and what doesn't, and I'd be glad to hear from anyone else who may have a similar or different take on things.

The Quote from Netflix

PEOPLE OVER PROCESS

Many of us have worked at companies where decisions were made top down, there was little transparency and it felt hard to make a difference—or even get basic things done. At Netflix, we aim to inspire and empower more than just manage because people can have a greater impact when they’re free to make decisions about their own work.

As part of this, we strive to develop good decision-making muscles at every level of the company, priding ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior leaders make. We expect managers to practice context not control—giving their teams the context and clarity needed to make good decisions instead of trying to control everything themselves. We also help employees learn by sharing a lot of information internally, including through memos where they can comment and ask questions. It takes an unusually responsible person to thrive on this level of freedom—someone who’s self-motivated, self-aware and self-disciplined, who doesn’t wait to be told what to do and picks up the trash like they would at home. That said, context not control should not be confused with hands-off management. Managers need to be involved in the work being done around them, and actively coach their teams. They may also have to step in when someone is about to make a decision that is unethical or could materially harm Netflix, during a crisis or if a new team member lacks the full context.

Context is everything

Every workplace has its own quirks: old decisions nobody remembers making because someone already resigned, uneven knowledge distribution, hidden dependencies between teams, clashing incentives between functions, and relationships that don't show themselves on the organisation chart. To me, giving someone “context” means making enough of that messy reality visible for them to make a good decision.

To do that, a leader has to understand the organisation unreasonably and exceptionally well. You need to know what makes the organisation work and suck, what leadership actually cares about but they are not saying, where teams are aligned, where they are not, and the assumptions nobody has looked at yet. You need to seek to question and understand everything, and be willing to question the status quo. In particular, this is especially important when you are in an organisation where everyone seems to just be trudging along busily, but they are all missing the forest for the trees because no one has their sights on the forest. You need to be relentless in your discovery of unknown unknowns so that they start turning into known ones.

You also need to connect a person's work to the wider mission. Why does their work matter? Who needs to understand its value? How does it map to the organisation's priorities? Good work can still fail because that mapping exists only in the person's or team's head and nobody else in the organisation can see it. That's how disinterest begins.

I think of useful context as basically having three parts to it:

Mission: Why the work matters, what outcome we are trying to create, and which trade-offs matter most.
Terrain: The constraints, history, dependencies, relationships, and risks surrounding the work.
Person: What this particular person already knows, what they may be missing, and how much detail they need to move confidently.

The third layer is easy to overlook and difficult to master. In my experience, the same explanation will not work equally well for everyone. This is because people have different experience, biases, competencies, strengths, weaknesses, working relationships, and knowledge gaps. Thus, context is only useful if it reaches the person in a form they can act on, in a manner that they can digest.

Context is not the amount of information you share. It is the amount of ambiguity you remove.

This also means that you cannot provide good context from a distance. You have to stay plugged into the work, talk to people outside your immediate team, and build relationships way before you urgently need them some day. Otherwise, you are not giving context, and you are just giving your best guess advice that is not really practically useful. I've seen a lot of senior leaders do this, and they just leave more chaos in their tracks because they think that their value add is proportional to the number of words that come out of their mouths.

Managers are not message routers

There's also a point in Netflix's culture deck that talks about sharing information widely. The obvious interpretation is to communicate everything, forward every message, add everyone to every channel, and make all information public. I've seen some leaders who believe that this supposed culture of 'radical transparency' about everything that is happening is what makes them a good leader.

But from experience, dumping knowledge on people is completely not equivalent to helping people understand context with clarity and purpose.

The reality is that teams are complicated, and every bit of information arrives with different levels of accuracy, relevance, and emotions. We are all too familiar with how a half-formed comment from a senior leader can quickly become a supposed company priority. An ambiguous update can create an entire narrative before anyone checks what it actually means. The irony is that more information can sometimes produce less clarity.

So the really important part of a leader's job is context translation. This means working out what matters and what doesn't, relentlessly clarifying what is murky until you are fully convinced and internalised (otherwise you risk a broken telephone situation), and framing it for your own team.

Before passing information on, I make sure I think through the following questions:

What does this person need to understand to do their work effectively?
What remains uncertain or unconfirmed, and how do I communicate these nuances?
What decisions do I need this person to make, and how should I explicitly communicate these expectations?
When should they come back for help? (the answer should be anytime)

At this point, some might say that this is starting to sound like hiding inconvenient information or controlling the story. But that's really not the point. Instead, I'm asking you to be honest about what you can and cannot provide to your team. Your job as the leader is to become so good at separating the signal from the noise so that people can focus on all the things that matter with the right expectations.

A manager who shares everything has exercised radical transparency, but has failed in creating clarity.

Ultimately, when the context is unclear, a leader should not pretend otherwise. Go back, ask the awkward questions, resolve the contradictions, and make the uncertainty explicit, even if you makes you seem stupid. There is no question too costly to ask; the cost comes when your pride gets in the way and you make a costly assumption that has downstream effects on your team. Clarity does not require you to know everything as a leader; in fact you should empower your team to uncover the unknowns for themselves. But more leaders can afford to be sharper and more honest about what is known, what is not, and what needs to happen next.

Managers are not message routers.

Management intensity is a scale, not a binary

“Context, not control” is sometimes mistaken for hands-off management. If it's not already obvious, I do not think that is what it means at all.

We all know that managers need to understand the work around them and coach the people doing it. But the difficult part is deciding what “involved” should look like. There is no universal answer because the right distance depends on the person, the size and nature of the work, and the consequences of getting it right or wrong.

As a manager, I dynamically adjust my involvement based on a few considerations:

How familiar is this person with the problem and the organisation?
How costly or reversible is the decision?
Is this person showing progress, initiative, sound judgement, and a willingness to ask for help?

If you lead a team of five engineers, the right level of involvement might mean reviewing major design documents without commenting on every bug fix. If you lead five engineering teams, you may stop reviewing those designs altogether. Instead, you might work with the managers to understand system-level risks, collaboration problems, and the context gaps emerging between teams.

With a new team member, I prefer to start from trust and give them room to show me how they operate, and then I adjust accordingly. If they are proactive, communicate clearly, and seek help at the right moments, I can sometimes step even further back. But if important gaps keep appearing, I don't hesitate to step in and guide, not necessarily to take control and micromanage their life, but to add structure and context to how they think about their work. You need to know how to read people well, especially the things that they don't say.

And that's why hiring good people is extremely important. Hiring a team of 'unusually responsible' people and trusting them has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my time as a leader. At the same time, every person will have their moment of weakness, and so your real skill is noticing when to step in, and to help him or her ask for help. The same goes for yourself, so you will need an unusual degree of self-awareness for that. With really competent people, identifying their blind spots can be more difficult than with most people, so build that culture of trust and transparency right from the get-go so that they come to you organically.

Coaching starts with a friendship and vulnerability

If it's not already obvious, you cannot calibrate that level of management if you do not understand the person you are managing, the person you are asking to trust in you.

What are they especially good at? Where do they lose confidence? What kind of work do they like or avoid? Who should they be talking to but are not? Which strengths deserve more visibility to their peers and leaders, so that others can learn and also understands their contribution? And what are they insecure about? What do they care about outside of work? And how does that affect what the version of themselves that they bring to work?

Coaching is almost like a friendship. Unlike what some managers believe, it does not entail telling someone how you would do every piece of their work. That's the easiest way to make someone anxious and lose ownership over what they have been entrusted with. Instead, it is helping them to see their current situation, to see themselves in the situation more clearly, and then giving them a useful nudge in the right direction, with the right level of motivation, tools, networks and support. Sure it sounds vague, but really the main point here is not to just show them how them how to do their job, but to help them know themselves better in the work context, and in so doing become more self-aware about how to own their work effectively. Almost like a therapist.

The really tough part is that you have to get them to open up to you. Demanding vulnerability requires setting up psychological safety, so constantly ask your team members: What am I doing that helps you? What am I doing that gets in your way? Where do you need more from me, and where do you need less? My door is always open, come to me anytime

And as with friendships, people will only speak honestly if it feels safe to do so. A leader cannot demand psychological safety into existence if they don't lead by example. So, as with friendships, you usually have to offer some vulnerability first: admit when you are unsure, own your mistakes, and show that difficult feedback will not be punished. Prioritise investing time and energy into your team, and your team will learn to trust you.

Ownership helps you scale as a leader

The easiest way to make someone lose interest in their work is to make them feel that they do not own any part of it. Someone can become extremely good at completing tasks, but if every meaningful decision belongs to the leader, they will remain a task completer forever. That is not how you build an extraordinary team, and it is definitely not how you scale yourself to fulfil the goals you have for the team.

Netflix uses the term “informed captain” for the person responsible for making a significant decision. It's a simple but powerful idea because it combines two things that leaders often separate and neglect: the team member needs enough information to make a decision, and they need genuine authority to make the decision.

How do you instil a sense of ownership? I've found myself essentially doing the following:

Give someone clear context behind the problem statement. This is very important because you will constantly come back to it, especially when the work gets tough and tricky.
Make it clear what they own and which decisions are theirs to make. And respect those boundaries.
Stay available and resist the temptation of quietly taking the work back. For ICs who became managers recently, this is a particularly tempeting trap.
Let the outcome produce learning, whether it succeeds or fails, quickly or slowly. You will always feel like you can give a lesson or just show someone how it's done - resist that because the best way to help someone improve is to help them understand why the problem happened in the first place and why it is a problem.
Channel that learning actively into the next decision, don't leave it unsaid, and use it for your own reflection also as a leader in terms of how and when you exercise managerial judgement. Whenever someone on your team makes a mistake, there is always a role you have to play in it.

If you say “here you own this,” but then you override every small or medium decision that differs from your preferred path, then that's not giving true ownership to your team members. I've seen this happen too many times. It also breaks when a 'hands-off' leader completely disappears for a while from the process and only returns to judge the outcome.

Ownership requires the right mix of autonomy and support at the same time, it looks different with different team members, with different kinds of work, and at different points in their own career.

When someone truly owns a problem, they spend time thinking about it in ways you cannot. They notice the finer details, develop low-level and big-picture judgement, and find ideas that you may have never thought about.

That is the real way a leader scales: not by getting more people to follow your instructions, but by helping more people make good decisions without you.

And when you find disagreements with your team member that keep repeating, merely repeating yourself more forcefully is rarely the answer. Ask yourself why this gap keeps appearing, not on a personal level, or even about the immediate context, but about wider assumptions and attitudes about the type of problem. Reduce all misaligned understandings of the context, and genuinely consider whether you are pushing too hard for your own personal preference. That takes a tremendous level of humility and self-awareness, and I have to admit that I struggle with it all the time. Above all, fall back to the team's first principles: the mission, the impact that matters, and the trade-offs the team is willing to make. Find agreement before solving the disagreements.

No one is born a leader

There is a lot to be said about nature and nurture when it comes to one's personality. Yet, in the realm of leadership, I firmly believe that nurture has the outsized influence; after all, if we did not exist in organisations, teams, there would be no one to be a leader of. We often attribute too much to our ownselves for our own accomplishments in leadership.

I am still figuring out how to do all of this well. As I said at the get go, I did not become a manager and leader because I wanted more control. I became one because I realised early on that the mission was bigger than what I could do alone, and over time, I realised that the irony is that the only way to scale that mission was to give some control away. It was tough, and I made some of those mistakes I talked about along the way.

Every team member needs a different mix of freedom, clarity, challenge, and support. I knew that about myself and what I needed. But most people fail to realise what others need in this regard. The reality is that every organisation holds a different kind of complexity and set of unknowns, and every new level of leadership you rise into changes which details you should hold closely and which ones you have to let go.

There's a particularly poetic quote at the end of the Netflix culture deck that I think is worth repeating here. It's from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince, and here it goes:

If you want to build a ship,
don't drum up the people
to gather wood, divide the
work, and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn
for the vast and endless sea.

That is the kind of leader I aspire to become: someone who makes the destination worth caring about, and gathering a trusty crew that cares about getting there together, no matter how scary and long the journey might be.