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Session insight · 6 March 2026
How does a technology leader scale themselves without burning out?
Cate Huston's answer is to treat your own capacity as a system you are responsible for. Manage energy, not just time. Treat leadership styles as tools rather than identities. Use small, frequent feedback so you never need the big intervention. And get balance by doing more life, not less work.
Most advice on scaling is about the team. Cate Huston's session was about the other half of the problem, the one technology leaders tend to leave until last: scaling yourself. She has led engineering organisations through fast growth and written the book on it, and she brought a practical, unsentimental view of what self management actually means when the job keeps getting bigger.
Her framing for the room was that every leadership role shares one mission. You are there to be a force multiplier, and your primary job is to close the gap between where the team sits today and what the business will need in twelve months. Everything else in the session, energy, range, feedback and life outside work, was in service of staying able to do that.
Five takeaways
The strategic mission is to be a force multiplier.
Every leadership role shares the same constant mission. Your primary job is to close the gap between where the team sits today and what the business will need in twelve months.
Energy management is not time management.
The two are completely distinct. Leaders often have excellent time management and remain exhausted, because they have never identified what is disproportionately draining them. Find that first.
Leadership styles are a neutral toolset.
Treat styles as tools for different situations rather than moral positions. The broader your range, the more effective you can be, and the less any one situation costs you.
Small feedback prevents big interventions.
Frequent, curious "small f" feedback conversations stop you ever needing a high-stakes "capital F" one. Addressing performance when it is not yet an emergency keeps people off the formal path.
You get balance by doing more life, not less work.
Propose something compelling for your evening that pulls you away from the work thoughts you don't want to give energy to. Subtracting work leaves a gap. Adding life fills it.
What this means for technology leaders
The technology leader's week is reactive by default: incidents, delivery, decks. Cate's first two takeaways are a way out of that. If your job is the twelve-month gap, then the question for any hour is whether it moves the team towards what the business will need, and the question for any week is what drained you rather than what filled it. Most leaders can name their calendar problems. Far fewer can name their energy problems, and those are the ones that end careers.
The feedback point lands hardest in technology, where the instinct is to fix rather than to talk. A five-minute curious conversation this week, about the thing you have noticed and not mentioned, is cheaper than the performance process in six months. And the last takeaway is the one to try tonight. Not less work. More life.
Be your best self.
Invitation only, free and a person at every step. If you lead technology and you'd rather not do it alone, ask to join.
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