Why Busyness Didn’t Get Me Promoted

Here’s the real trap. Busyness feels productive, but learning how to lead for outcomes is what drives promotability. For a long time, I thought motion meant progress. It doesn’t. Busy doesn’t equal promotable.

In organizations that move fast, it’s the people who expand their impact—not just their task lists—who get rewarded. The ones who step in to tackle the most important business problems, not only the biggest projects, stand out. Real orgs reward engineers who tackle the most important business problems, not just big projects, making impact outrank activity. I swapped a “do more” mentality for asking what truly moves the needle. Leadership isn’t about checking off tasks. It’s about driving results that matter.

I started noticing everywhere I worked: ICs and AI builders were shipping constantly—cranking out new features, launching experiments, patching bugs. Productivity looked great on a dashboard. But influence stalled, and so did promotability, because the focus stayed locked on throughput and velocity. Almost no one stopped to ask if what they shipped actually changed anything for the company or the team. I started seeing this pattern on every team I’d been on.

Next week—and every week after—you can choose differently. Shift your focus from activity to impact to increase impact as an engineer, and you’ll earn trust through consistent leadership, influence, and momentum.

Impact, Not Activity: Why Leverage Wins

Early in my career, I confused “working hard” with “being valuable.” I figured if I just tackled more incidents, feature flags, or proofs-of-concept than anyone else, everything else would follow. I had to accept I was playing the wrong game. Leaders don’t just “do more”—they get more done by expanding their impact across people, not just things they cross off a list. Performance outcomes were predicted using data from tens of thousands of industry professionals tracked over years, grounding our view of scalable impact. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see that scalable impact isn’t about hustle. It’s about leverage.

Here’s an analogy. Churning through JIRA tickets day after day is like trying to optimize every single CPU instruction to run faster. Useful, sure, but it doesn’t scale—you’ll always hit a limit. Writing the scheduler, though? That’s what coordinates everything, letting the whole system run better. Coordination beats raw speed, every time.

This is how leverage actually works. If you pick what problems you’ll tackle, make decisions that align the team, and give others the clarity (and trust) to execute well, suddenly your impact multiplies. Just cranking up throughput—shipping faster, fixing bugs as they pop up—eventually hits diminishing returns. Once you make your work bigger than your own output, you create a flywheel. Your guidance, choices, and ability to raise others amplify what your team achieves.

If you’re wondering what actually earns trust and influence, it all comes down to this. Clear direction and decisive choices are the currency leaders trade in. When roles are clarified, expectations become more manageable and organizational predictability rises—clarity drives trust and influence. I only earned bigger bets when I started making ambiguity smaller. Clarity builds trust.

How to Lead for Outcomes: The Weekly Cadence That Scales Your Impact

Here’s the shift. Every Monday, I commit to an outcome-focused leadership cadence—not endless activity—but one simple question—what’s the single action that would move us forward most this week? The first week I committed to this cadence, my work actually scaled. Instead of asking, “What can I do next?” I ask myself, “What action will move the needle most?” Then, I focus relentlessly on that and let everything else follow. This isn’t about working harder. It’s about choosing harder.

Step one. Pick one high-leverage outcome. High-leverage means the action unlocks progress for multiple people or steers a whole project in a better direction. If you’re deep in IC work, it could be architecting a critical integration that other engineers are blocked on, or writing the initial test harness that lets folks safely deploy models. In AI product land, maybe your spike on dataset reliability means others stop chasing ghost bugs. For ML teams, that single, well-scoped experiment design can unblock three subteams hunting for signal. You’ll recognize it—the outcome only you can drive, because you have context nobody else does. Once I started focusing here, both my energy and our momentum spiked. The team felt it. Blockers melted away.

Step two. Delegate one lower-leverage task. I resisted this for years. It felt risky, almost lazy, handing off work I knew I could nail myself. But the uptick in results was huge once I adopted effective delegation strategies—handing off with a decent brief: context, priorities, plus a couple of guardrails. It turns out that when you delegate with support, the bar actually gets raised. You don’t just give away chores; you empower someone to deliver, learn, and grow. If it feels like only you can do it, walk that back—most “only I can” work is really just habit.

Step three. Make one clear decision and communicate it. Don’t let decisions bottleneck others. I write a brief note: options, trade-offs, why I picked what I did. Then I publish it in the team channel or our wiki. The act of surfacing choices—even something as small as “Model A gets the next round of benchmarks, not Model B”—tightens execution right away. Teams stop spinning. Publishing decisions publicly became a quiet signal that tightened our execution. You’re not just moving your work forward; your clarity lets everyone move.

A messy moment: Last summer, I realized I couldn’t find a single uninterrupted hour in my week to think. Every slot was chewed up by “quick syncs” and status reviews (which never felt quick). I started keeping a tally of how often someone asked “Got a minute?”—one Tuesday, I counted seven. The truth was, the more I said yes to random asks, the less I actually moved the needle. It sounds obvious now, but back then, I worried that blocking off time for my own priorities would look selfish or disengaged. I still slip on this—sometimes a good conversation is exactly what sparks the right insight—but most weeks, the value comes from picking and guarding what matters.

Resolving Doubts: How to Confidently Adopt the Weekly Cadence

You’re thinking, “I don’t have time.” I get it—I used to feel the same way, tallying up meetings and micro-decisions. But here’s the math. Make one smart decision up front and you save days of backtracking. Set one clear outcome and half your meetings turn into five-line updates instead of hour-long debates. One aligned move compresses weeks of churn.

Next. “I’ll lose my technical edge if I spend time delegating or deciding instead of building.” This fear’s real—I’ve wrestled it myself. What changed for me was adding ‘depth sprints’—focused blocks where I dig in, design, or prototype something core. I still do code reviews for the gnarly pieces and write the main design docs. Choosing to protect my deep work time was the only way I stayed sharp, especially when my calendar filled with higher-leverage opportunities.

There’s also the voice saying, “Delegation lowers quality.” What finally shifted my perspective: when I started handing off work with crisp briefs—laying out the problem, context, and a couple of clear acceptance criteria—plus built-in milestone check-ins and paired early for a walk-through, results didn’t drop. They actually improved.

The first time I paired on a handoff and reviewed a midpoint demo, the result flat-out beat what I could’ve done flying solo—fewer blind spots, better patterns. Set up safeguards, give support, and outline what ‘done’ looks like. When someone knows you’re invested (but not micromanaging), quality rises. Framing cuts down the back-and-forth cycle, so everyone builds off the same standards. If you’re worried about dropping the ball, build in milestone check-ins and early pairings. Anyone coached well can deliver up to your bar, sometimes straight past it.

Let’s be honest—sometimes it feels like writing a recipe and letting a friend cook dinner for the group. In the beginning, I hated stepping away from the stove. But every time I let go and handed off the prep, everyone ate sooner, and the meal picked up new flavor. Turns out, letting go was exactly how I learned to actually lead the meal, not just make it.

There’s one tension here I haven’t really solved. Even now, I sometimes miss that hit of instant gratification from closing out a dozen quick wins instead of investing in bigger bets. Part of me still goes hunting for things to check off when everything feels uncertain. Maybe that’s just how momentum builds at the start. I’m not sure it ever fully goes away.

The doubts are natural. The switch pays off. Block time for depth. Brief well. Pair or check milestones. With a cadence rooted in impact, you don’t lose your edge—you scale it.

Commit to Amplified Impact: Your Call to Action

Promotion in tech isn’t a reward for busyness—it’s earned when you lead with impact. Expanded scope, clear decisions, and enabled teams are the real currency leaders trade in. The work didn’t get easier when I made this shift. It just became a whole lot more meaningful.

You might remember that tally of “Got a minute?” moments from earlier. Building real impact—week by week—means shifting those minutes toward actual leverage and investing in relationships. As you make decisions, pair them with 1:1s or shared chats to hear out concerns before they snowball. Invest in trust—not just with your team, but across functions—so your clarity sticks and your decisions actually move people. I found my momentum doubled when my choices landed with empathy and early feedback.

Choose impact over activity. Start the weekly cadence today—commit to leading for outcomes by focusing on the work that scales your influence, not just your task count. This is how trust and promotability actually grow.