Leadership ramblings

We need multipliers, not gatekeepers

Beware of knowledge silos

Stefano Tortarolo
2 min readJul 10, 2020
Gatekeepers vs Multipliers
Drawing by the author
  • Don’t centralise ownership and knowledge, spread them across the team
  • Be a multiplier and grow the members of your team, there’s only so much a single person can achieve
  • The Hero culture based on the lonely contributor hacking away in their garage at night and coming up with the perfect solution is a pipe-dream, inefficient and heavily toxic. Most engineers want colleagues to learn from and build things together, not playing catch-up on the random ramblings of a sleep-deprived fuelled PR

Over the years and across companies with quite different cultural background and size, I noticed a recurrent pattern: some people tend to centralise knowledge and ownership.

In some contexts I’ve seen it coming out of fear of becoming not essential, but most of the time I felt it is because they genuinely think that’s the only way to get a promotion, a compensation adjustment or just prove they are worth having a certain position in the company.

The best engineers I worked with and the best managers I had the pleasure to report to taught me otherwise. Seniority and impact on a company are not about how much work depends on you; they’re about how productive and effective you can make the people that work with you.

Being the only person able to deal with a problem or to push for a project has so many drawbacks:

  • You have to be called if something goes wrong. I don’t know many people that enjoy a pager when sipping on a cocktail on a beach
  • You are limiting your own chances to learn something new from the colleagues you could have brought to your level of expertise on the topic. Maybe now you’re the expert, but keep in mind that knowledge decays fast
  • If there’s an open position within the company you’d like to take, you’re stuck dealing with your precious walled-garden. The other alternative is creating misery and despair to the next colleague that will have to pick that up once you forced your transition to the other role. That might seem acceptable in the short run, but I suspect that’s not a good way to make friends at work

There’s much more I could ramble on about this topic, but for now I want to reiterate once more a piece of advice that I gave peers engineers I was mentoring and that served me well over the years and I keep repeating to my teams: spread the knowledge you’re accumulating and ensure your peers are growing.

Your colleagues will thank you, your manager most likely will have an easier life building a case for your next step in your career progression. And you will finally be able to enjoy some peaceful weekends, whatever way suits you best.

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Stefano Tortarolo
Stefano Tortarolo

Written by Stefano Tortarolo

Avid reader. I spend most of my time inside my head. Engineering Leader.

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