Building Your Leadership Stack: A Technical Leader’s Guide to 2025

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we grow as leaders, especially those of us who started in technical roles. After spending over 20 years moving from hardware and software engineering to leading teams and coaching leaders, I’ve noticed some interesting patterns.

We often talk about tech stacks in our development work. You know – the careful selection and layering of technologies that make our systems work. Each layer adds to the system, but no one layer can do it all.  And the system is only as good as its weakest layer.  It hit me recently that leadership develops in similar layers.

I want to share what I’ve learned about building a solid leadership stack. This comes from my own journey and from working with technical leaders at companies like Philips, Siemens, and Cox Automotive.

Let’s break it down into layers, just like we would with a tech stack.

The Foundation Layer: Self-Awareness & Emotional Intelligence

This is your leadership operating system. Without it, nothing else runs quite right. It took me a while to figure this one out on my own.

When I first moved into leadership, I tried to solve every problem like a technical issue – very systematically. Identify the defect, fix the bug, deploy the solution. But when the problems leaders face are around teams, strategy and interactions, it doesn’t work that way. As leaders, we have to look beyond the mechanics of the situation – who did or said what. 

We need to be aware of our own emotions and how the influence our actions.  Then we need to be aware of the emotions of others and how it influences their behavior.  And finally, we need to see how our emotions and actions influence the emotions and actions of others.  It is a very complex system that needs focus and attention from you as a leader.

The Communication Layer

This is like your middleware – it connects everything. You need to speak multiple languages: technical, business, and most importantly, human. 

I see a lot of technical leaders get frustrated because they’re using the same communication style for every situation, kind of like trying to use SQL to talk to every type of database.

The broader your scope as a leader, the more different languages you have to incorporate into your lexicon.

When I was leading R&D teams at Philips, I noticed that the most effective technical leaders could switch seamlessly between detailed technical discussions with their teams, strategic conversations with executives, and collaborative dialogues with other departments.

Recently I watched a fantastic technical leader repeatedly fail to get her architecture proposals approved, not because of the technical design, but because she was using technical language with the business stakeholders – once she started talking about customer impact and business outcomes instead of implementation details, things started moving forward.

It comes down to this – being right isn’t enough – you have to help different audiences see why it matters to them by speaking their language.

The Team Development Layer

This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s your user interface – where leadership becomes visible and makes an impact.

One of my favorite examples is a leader I worked with who went from writing 60% of his team’s code to building a team that delivered three times more without him touching the keyboard, but the journey there wasn’t easy. He had to learn that his job wasn’t to be the best engineer anymore – it was to build an environment where his engineers could thrive and grow.

Like many technical leaders, he struggled with stepping back, and would often jump in to fix technical problems himself – after all, that was his expertise.  You know the feeling – he could do it faster, it would take longer to teach someone else than to just do it, he didn’t want to burden the team, he didn’t want to make the team feel bad, and on and on it goes.  We worked together to help him see that every time he jumped in, he was actually slowing down his team’s growth and taking away their opportunity to shine.

The breakthrough came when he started measuring* his success not by the problems he solved, but by the problems his team solved without him. What’s interesting is that his technical credibility actually increased with his team during this transition, even though he was doing less technical work, because they could see how his new approach was helping them grow and succeed.

*Interesting side note there – if you want to change something, anything, including a mindset or a behavior, you have to measure it.

The Strategic Layer

This is about seeing the bigger picture and making decisions that scale. I have seen so many technical leaders struggle with connecting technical decisions to business outcomes.  They see great technical ideas fail to get prioritized because they seem like solutions looking for problems.

I worked with one leader who was frustrated because his team’s microservices transformation kept getting pushed down the priority list.  The business leaders wanted shiny new features, not an architecture redesign.  But when we reframed it to show how it would reduce time to market for future new features by 40%, suddenly executives were asking how they could help make it happen.

The most successful technical leaders I’ve worked with learned to start with the business impact first and then work backward to the technical solution, rather than the other way around. What’s fascinating is that this shift in thinking often led to simpler technical solutions because they were focused on business value rather than technical elegance. The hardest part for most technical leaders is learning to let go of technically interesting solutions that don’t drive meaningful business results.

The Reality Check

Here’s the thing – just like with technology, you can’t build all these layers at once. You need to start somewhere and continuously improve. 

I’ve found it helpful to do regular leadership retrospectives. Ask yourself:

  • Is my team growing stronger?
  • Are my decisions making a broader impact?
  • Am I spending my time on the right things?

To help you get started with this evaluation process, I’ve created a free Technical Leadership Pitfalls Navigator. This 11-page guide dives deeper into these topics, includes a detailed self-evaluation tool, and provides a practical planning guide to help you take action. You can grab it at https://coachshawn.net/leadership-pitfalls/

What’s Next?

As we move through 2025, the demands on technical leaders keep evolving. The good news is that leadership capabilities can be built systematically, just like we build our technical systems.

Take a moment to think about your leadership stack. Which layer needs the most attention right now? What’s one thing you could improve each week?  Spend maybe 30 minutes reading, thinking, reflecting.  Then spend 30 minutes taking action of some kind!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. What layers are you focusing on in your leadership journey?


Since launching my independent coaching practice, I’ve been passionate about helping technical leaders build their leadership stack. If you’d like to explore how to strengthen your leadership stack, let’s schedule a free 45-minute strategy session – you can book using the button at the top of the page. And don’t forget to grab the Leadership Pitfalls Navigator to jumpstart your development. Sometimes the best debugging tool is a good conversation 🙂

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