Formal leadership roles are not the only way to lead. Aspiring leaders should seek opportunities to guide projects, initiatives, or teams they don't directly manage. These experiences provide valuable feedback and demonstrate leadership capability long before a promotion, removing the mental boundary that a title is required to lead.

The most common mistake for new leaders is reverting to their individual contributor mindset, feeling the need to provide answers directly. True leadership success comes from shifting to a facilitator role, enabling the team to find solutions, which provides more long-term value and scales their impact.

To prevent management from becoming a detached layer, Arista ensures its leaders are "coach players." This means even senior executives, like the CTO and founder, still contribute by coding. This "leading by example" approach proves to employees that management is connected to the core work, reinforcing a strong, authentic engineering culture.

A critical career inflection point is moving from solely executing tasks (writing code) to influencing strategic decisions about what problems to solve. True value and impact come from being in the room where decisions are made, not just being the person who implements them.

A great tech lead provides a safety net without micromanaging. The analogy is a driving instructor who starts with their hands near a second steering wheel, ready to intervene, but gradually backs off as trust builds with the student. This approach gives engineers freedom to grow while ensuring the project stays on track.

Mentoring's value increases when done outside your direct org. It becomes a two-way street: you learn about other parts of the business, and you can plant seeds of influence and better engineering practices that can grow and spread organically throughout the company.

Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.

Mentoring provides leaders with a grounded view of challenges across the organization. This fosters empathy and a "systems thinking" mindset, reminding leaders that sustainable impact comes not just from building products, but from enabling the people who build them and creating space for them to grow.

To avoid becoming an "ivory tower" manager, engineering leaders should use side projects as a playground for new technologies. This practice ensures they understand the limitations of new tools like AI and can provide credible, concrete, hands-on guidance to their teams.