#8 - I realized I was leading a team of ghosts.
Last Tuesday, I caught myself doing it again.
I’m worried that we are all moving too fast to see the people we are leading. If you felt that weight today, you aren’t alone. I send out a notes every day to help us stay human in this machine. I’d love to have you in the room with us.
An engineer sent me a Slack message with a complex architectural question.
I didn’t even blink. I typed out a three-paragraph solution, hit enter, and felt that hit of dopamine. “I’m a helpful leader,” I told myself.
Five minutes later, it hit me. I had just stolen his job.
I didn’t give him guidance. I gave him an instruction. I didn’t help him grow I just used him as a keyboard to execute my own thoughts.
I was treating leadership as a Noun a position of “The Answer Man.” I had forgotten the Verb.
The Quiet Crisis of the “Order-Taker”
We talk about “Efficiency” and “AI Velocity” like they are the ultimate goals.
But look at your team’s eyes during the next Standup. Do they look like owners?
Or do they look like they’re waiting for the next ticket to tell them they still have a job?
When we provide every answer, we create Moral Technical Debt.
The team stops owning the outcome. They stop being Authors. They become Clerks.
If the system crashes at 2:00 AM, a “Clerk” looks for the manual. An “Author” knows how to fix it because they lived the logic.
How to Practice the Verb: 3 Living Use Cases
To reclaim agency, you have to stop being the hero. Here is how I’ve started practicing the “Verb” of Yielding in the wild:
1. The “Dangerous” Slack Pause
The Scene: A junior dev pings you: “The API is throwing a 500, what should I do?”
The Old Way: You check the logs and tell them the fix.
The Verb: You wait 15 minutes. Even if you know the answer.
The Result: 60% of the time, they ping back: “Found it! It was a config mismatch.” You didn’t solve a bug; you built a person’s confidence.
2. The “Context-Only” Brief
The Scene: You need to migrate a database.
The Old Way: You write a 5-page spec detailing the exact steps.
The Verb: You write a 1-page “Problem Brief.” You define the outcome (Zero downtime, <50ms latency) and the constraints (Budget, Time). Then you ask: “How would you handle the data integrity?”
The Result: They might choose a path you didn’t think of. Now, it’s their migration. They will fight for its success in a way they never would for yours.
3. The “AI-Review” Pivot
The Scene: You see a Pull Request that looks suspiciously “perfect” (clearly LLM-generated).
The Old Way: You LGTM (Looks Good To Me) and merge.
The Verb: You leave one comment: “The AI chose a recursive approach here. Tell me why that’s better than an iterative one for our specific memory constraints?”
The Result: You aren’t “policing” AI you are reclaiming the engineer’s Agency. You are inviting the human back into the pilot’s seat.
The Soul of the Machine
Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about creating a room where everyone is invited to be smart.
When you practice the Verb of yielding space, you aren’t being “lazy.”
You are being essential. You are protecting the soul of the people who build the thing.
Are you leading a team of creators, or a team of executors? The difference is in the space you leave between your words.
Who am I?
I’m Diamantino Almeida, and I’ve spent my career at the intersection of high-growth engineering and strategic leadership.
From scaling technical teams to advising CTOs and Founders, my focus is on “Leadership as a Verb“, the idea that leading is an active, evolving practice, not a static title. Having navigated the shifts from manual infrastructure to cloud, and now to Agentic AI, I’m dedicated to helping the next generation of engineers find their footing in a world that is moving faster than ever.
Beyond advisory, I’m an active Top global 9% *mentor on *MentorCruise, where I help developers and leaders bridge the gap between “writing code” and “delivering business value.”