You’re constantly balancing competing demands — supporting your team, meeting delivery expectations, advocating for engineering health, responding to leadership and general admin. The result can be a relentless cycle of context switching, long hours, and the sense that you’re never quite doing enough.

You may suffer from irritability, concentration difficulties, or even resentment toward the role you once enjoyed. At the same time, the constant stream of meetings, messages, and tickets in your work management systems can leave you feeling like you’re drowning in tasks, with no clear way to prioritize. How can you step back when the demands never stop? What happens when the guilt of letting others down keeps you pushing past your limits?

Let's look at that last sentence close up. There's one fragment in particular I want to focus on: the guilt of letting others down.

But why is that all on your shoulders? Just because you're leading a team, doesn't mean you aren't also a member of that team. You're helping them, but they can also help you. If you do everything for them and see everything as a one-way street, with you letting them down when you fail to be super-human, then of course you're going to burn out.

So, what can you do?

Here's one simple tip:

Surround yourself with people better than you.

Huh? But aren't you supposed to be the most highly skilled person? Aren't you the one with all the skills and experience, helping them all to progress so they can reach the same point as you? Well, yes to the second part but absolutely not to the first. The better they are, the more they can help you. The more they want your job, the more likely they are to step up and take work away from you because it'll help them gain the experience they want and need.

But most importantly: The more proficient they are, the more they can take weight from your shoulders and help you find better ways of doing things. Help you to work smarter, not harder. Help you to deprioritise the things that can't be done.

Because you are perfect just as you are. And if you're burning out because your workload is too high, that's not because you're not capable, that's because your workload is too high. Nobody can achieve the impossible. Working harder doesn't make things better, it just makes you burn out faster, and either way, the impossible workload will not get done.

So you make the workload smaller by (a) giving parts of it to other people and (b) finding ways of removing the less important stuff and making the more important stuff easier. And ALL of that is more possible when the people around you are the best they can possibly be. And they know that you WANT them to be proficient and you WANT them to succeed. Because everybody benefits when they do.

Come find me, let me help you

There are many ways we can get together explore this and related topics further:

• I'm going to be discussing exactly this topic at a solution swap session at Lead Dev Berlin on Mon 3rd Nov 2025.
• I'm running a one-day workshop for Trifork Academy in Amsterdam on Nov 19th 2025, on the topic "How to handle the technical part of technical leadership"
• You can host a similar workshop at your own organisation
• You can keep an eye on my socials (LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon)
  • …and my events page…
  • …for new workshops and training sessions
• You can ​read the testimonials​
  • …from people who've attended my workshops and trainings