Most days, the real work isn’t about what’s on the to-do list. It’s the constant shifting between details and direction, knowing when to dive deep and when to come back up for air.
I used to think there was a map for this. Management books lay out neat layers: strategy at the top, execution at the bottom, tidy flow from one to the other. Reality is messier. Some days I’ll start sketching architecture for a new service. Within an hour I’m chasing a production bug or untangling a hand-off that’s blocking delivery.
It’s rarely a smooth climb. Most weeks feel like running up a down escalator. Get a few steps up, set a direction, then gravity pulls you back: a fire, an unexpected dependency, some invisible bottleneck that only shows when work stops moving.
This is engineering leadership: knowing when to stay close, when to step back, how to watch the system while the day-to-day pulls you under. Building habits that resist gravity’s pull toward the nearest problem.
The Flight Levels framework helps here. Klaus Leopold’s Flight Levels: Leading Organizations with Business Agility describes three organisational altitudes:
“It’s not about getting everyone to 30,000 feet. It’s about knowing which altitude you’re at, why you’re there, and when it’s time to change.”
Flight Level One: Inside the team. Stories, bugs, stand-ups. The day-to-day where things are concrete, feedback loops tight. Deeply satisfying because you can see and touch the work.
Flight Level Two: Across teams. Dependencies, bottlenecks, hand-offs. The question shifts from “how do we ship this feature?” to “how do we keep the machine running?”
Flight Level Three: The balcony view. Systems thinking, business outcomes, portfolio management. Not about tickets or boards any more. It’s how the organisation adapts, allocates resources, stays focused on outcomes.
Gravity Always Wins
Gravity always pulls you back to level one. Every fire, incident, or broken hand-off tempts you to jump in and fix things directly. As an engineer, this feels like helping. As a leader, it treats symptoms, not causes. Stay in the weeds and nobody watches the system.
The only way to operate at the right level is building habits that force you to look up. Weekly reviews of cycle time, cross-team blockers, work pileups. Even just asking “are we working on the right thing?” before diving into the next fire.
Leadership isn’t helping your team do the work. It’s working on the system that produces the work:
- Stepping back regularly: Use rituals (weekly reviews, retros) to force altitude changes.
- Surfacing hidden constraints: Map dependencies, bottlenecks, and work hand-offs.
- Making goals explicit: The higher up you go, the fuzzier alignment gets, so over-communicate why and what, not just how.
- Resisting the urge to rescue: When you feel yourself about to jump into ticket triage, ask if you’re solving a one-off or treating a pattern.
Flight Levels as a Practice
I’m getting more deliberate about where I spend time, which altitude I’m operating at.
Flight Levels reminds you: you don’t need to stay at 30,000 feet. Know why you’re there, what needs attention, when to descend.
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