I was a COO before I knew what a P&L was. That sounds irresponsible stated that way. But it's the reality of how many IT professionals advance to executive roles: with solid technical experience, field-developed instincts, and a significant gap in business education that you fill as you go. What I learned managing IT teams in that role is more valuable than any certification I've earned.
Lesson 1: Clarity is the most valuable gift you can give a technical team
Technical teams tolerate ambiguity worse than you think. Not because they're rigid, but because they work with deterministic systems. When the human context is ambiguous — what's expected of them, what the priority is, what counts as success — anxiety and dysfunction appear quickly. My most important job wasn't making technical decisions. It was ensuring the team understood exactly the objective, the constraints, and how success was measured.
Lesson 2: The difficult conversations you avoid today are tomorrow's crises
The technical environment has a problem-solving culture. When something is broken, it gets fixed. That same culture, applied to people, produces the worst management mistake: avoiding the difficult conversation hoping the problem will "resolve itself." People problems don't resolve themselves. They fester. I learned this the most expensive way: letting situations I could have resolved with 30 minutes of conversation become problems that took months to resolve.
Lesson 3: Technical team motivation is different
Highly qualified technical teams aren't primarily motivated by money. They're motivated by interesting problems, by autonomy to solve them their way, by the sense that their work matters, and by recognition from peers. Practical applications: don't assign boring work without context, give real autonomy (not fictional), and recognize publicly while correcting privately.
I regularly share about this process on LinkedIn.