"When the situation gives you power"

A few years ago, I inherited a release manager as part of a team working on modernising a large legacy codebase.
It wasn’t ideal, we had a brittle system that required manual coordination to release.

In one of our 1:1s, I asked:

“What’s currently most important to you?”

He looked tired.
Turns out, the release was blocked, since the previous day, by a strange issue.
He wasn’t sure if it was new or known, so he was quietly digging through logs and code, trying to fix it on his own.

Meanwhile, changes from other developers were piling up, making the next release even riskier. Everyone was heads-down, shipping features, unaware they were stuck behind a silent bottleneck.

So I said:

“Why not tag everyone with changes in this release and let them know it’s blocked? Ask them to help if they want their stuff to go out.”

He did.
Within 30 minutes, the team swarmed the problem, found the issue, and deployed.

So what made the difference?

It wasn’t technical skill.
It wasn’t authority, he didn’t “own” the other engineers.
It was power shaped by urgency.

The situation gave him power, he just didn’t realise he could use it.

As leaders, we need to help people recognise those moments.
To name when urgency overrides hierarchy.
To give permission for someone to take up space when the context already justifies it.

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle

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