I’ve heard it called “the fire hydrant.” A full-blast explosion of information, thrown at force down your throat. That’s what it can feel like working in tech right now.
Everything is a priority, which means nothing really is. The big focus from Monday the 3rd will be forgotten and replaced by a new one on Monday the 10th. In the race to “win” with AI, this is the new normal. And for many people inside these companies, it feels chaotic. You start the week overwhelmed and end it wondering if you’ve achieved anything at all or just survived it.
The people who seem to struggle most in this environment are frontline managers. The ones leading teams of individual contributors. Gallup hinted at this last year, and I’m looking forward to their 2025 results, but we see it all the time. These managers are caught between two worlds.
On one hand, they’re ambitious professionals who genuinely want to lead well and help their teams succeed. On the other, they’re at the mercy of senior leaders who seem less like captains steering a ship through stormy waters and more like people throwing under-equipped rowing boats into the ocean to see which ones stay afloat.
It’s a hard place to perform effectively. And I’m yet to see any real training that prepares managers for it.
Here’s the world we see today inside many tech companies:
- You’re paid to do your job, but the job is far more complex than the job description suggests.
- The “how” of your work matters more than ever. With so much uncertainty, leaders are monitoring more closely than they used to.
- The short term rules. Anything that pays off in one to two years rarely gets space to breathe.
- Speed beats precision. Get the MVP out. Get the deck out. Get the next update out. Just move.
- And then there’s the noise. Slack. Teams. Meetings. Messages. When ambition is high and the future unclear, internal noise multiplies.
We’ve seen this play out first-hand through our Culture Diagnostic. Across dozens of tech teams, the data tells a clear story. When people lack clarity and direction, time gets wasted fast. In the lowest-clarity teams, we see around six hours a month lost per person to low-value work and internal churn. In the highest-clarity teams, that drops to about two. The difference isn’t more effort, it’s focus.
So how do you lead in this kind of chaos?
There are a few principles that can help.
1. Think context, not control
This idea comes from Netflix, and whether the story behind it is myth or truth, the principle is gold. When faced with uncertainty, our instinct is to apply control. We crave certainty, so we add more meetings, updates, and progress checks. But often, that creates more noise than clarity.
People start spending more time preparing updates than doing real work. Some even create fictional updates to keep the pressure off for another week. Others simply burn out.
As a leader, your job isn’t to control every step. It’s to make sure people understand what success looks like, then give them the space and autonomy to find their own way there. If they need more guidance, tailor it to their level of experience and confidence. (Situational leadership is useful here.) People value freedom, trust, and feedback. Those three things unlock performance.
The challenge, of course, is creating that space when you’re under pressure yourself. Which leads to the next idea.
2. Permission or forgiveness?
Sometimes you’ll need to create space for your team despite what’s happening above you. Sometimes you’ll need to ask for permission. It depends on your relationship with your own leaders.
If it’s strong, have an honest conversation about running a short experiment. Try something new for a fixed period, agree how you’ll measure it, and report back with what you’ve learned. Make it easy for your leader to say yes.
If the relationship isn’t strong, lead with evidence. How many hours are wasted in unproductive meetings? How much time disappears into internal noise? Gather what you can, then propose a different way of working. When you can show data, it’s much easier to win the right to experiment.
3. Communicate with clarity, not volume
We don’t have a shortage of ways to communicate. We have too many. The problem isn’t sending messages; it’s knowing which ones matter and how to make sure they’re understood.
Leaders don’t trust that their messages are being read, so they send them again. And again. They email. They post on Teams. They mention it in stand-ups. They cascade through other managers. Meetings turn into broadcasts. People tune out. And the cycle repeats.
The fix is simple but rarely done: ask your team how they want to be communicated with.
What’s the right channel? How often do they want updates? What format works best? Let them design it with you. You’ll be surprised by how much they care about getting this right.
Clarity is one of the most valuable gifts you can give your team. Our data from the Culture Diagnostic shows that low-clarity teams lose around six hours per person each month to low-priority work. High-clarity teams lose about two. That’s a half-day saved, every month, per person. It’s worth the effort.
Leadership today isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about cutting through the noise, creating space for others, and giving people clarity when the world around them has none.
It’s not easy work, but it’s never been more valuable.
If you’re interested in exploring how your effective your team environment is, we would be happy to explain how our Team Culture Diagnostic service works, and why companies like Salesforce, Adobe and HPE have all been using it! Just drop me a message on sean@craftyourculture.co.uk and I will personally talk it through with you 😊.
