The Player in Street Clothes

Last Friday, Jayson Tatum walked onto an NBA court for the first time in 298 days. Standing ovation. 15 points. 12 rebounds. 7 assists in 27 minutes.

But here’s what stuck with me: the Celtics were 42-21, second in the East as of this writing. Their best player hadn’t touched a court in ten months, and the team didn’t blink. Not because they replaced him. Because his coach built a system where Tatum’s presence, on the bench, in film sessions, in the locker room, kept shaping the team even when his body couldn’t play.

If you manage an engineering team, that’s your job too. And most of us haven’t figured it out yet.

As a die-hard Lakers fan, it hurts me to keep writing about other teams’ stars. But I’ve watched this pattern my whole life. Kobe on the bench with a torn achilles. Byron Scott said three words: “I wanted him around.” Phil Jackson won 11 rings not by being the smartest X’s-and-O’s coach, but by building a system where everybody touched the ball, everybody was empowered.

That’s coaching. The coach doesn’t play. The coach builds the system that makes the players around them better.

You’re the Coach

Gallup studied 27 million employees over 20 years. One finding towered over everything else: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Seventy percent. Not the mission statement. Not the tech stack. You.

The problem is right there in the same data. Manager engagement dropped to 27% globally. Workloads are up 51%. The instinct when you’re drowning is to do more yourself, not less. You review every PR. You answer every Slack thread. You sit in every meeting because “context.”

Liz Wiseman calls this the accidental diminisher. Diminishers get less than half their team’s capability. Not because they’re bad. Because they’re doing too much. She documented a case where a manager assigned a talented engineer routine tasks and solved their hard problems for them. The engineer ended up using 20-25% of their actual talent. Twenty-five percent.

You’ve got senior people on your team. The question isn’t whether they’re talented. It’s whether you’ve built a system where their presence — not their PRs — multiplies everyone around them.

Three ways to build that system.

1. Put Them in the Film Room

Mazzulla brought injured Tatum into the coaches’ film sessions and gave him a seat on the bench. Tatum said he spent time “seeing the game from their perspective.” His body couldn’t play. His basketball brain never stopped working.

Your team has film rooms. The CoEs. The postmortem. The design review. The experiment retro. But there’s a difference between your senior engineer attending these and your senior engineer running them. When they’re attending, they’re a participant. When they’re running them, their judgment shapes how the entire team thinks about the problem.

It’s your Staff Engineer leading the CoE after the outage, asking the questions that turn a 2 AM incident into a systemic fix. It’s your senior Data Scientist running the experiment review before the team wastes two weeks on a test with a confounding variable baked in. Not because you delegated a task. Because you put the person with the deepest judgment at the center of the room.

Make the film session exist. Recurring, not reactive. And name the person who runs it.

2. Let Them Set the Energy

When Curry broke his wrist in 2019, he became the Warriors’ self-appointed hype man. The Mavericks racked up $200K in fines for bench energy so contagious the NBA tried to legislate it. But the example that sticks with me is LeBron. Even in a quiet game, when a young Laker hits a three, LeBron is the first one up. The towel. The chest bump. He doesn’t celebrate his own plays anymore. He celebrates theirs. And the room changes.

This isn’t soft. The research is clear: team cohesion directly predicts performance. And that cohesion doesn’t come from the manager. It comes from the senior IC who writes the Slack post celebrating a junior’s first production deploy, even though their own project got deprioritized. The one who presents the team’s work at the leadership review, not for credit, but for awareness.

Stop hoarding the cultural work. Give your senior people the weekly wins slot, the team demo, the shoutout channel. Let them carry the temperature.

3. Make Their Presence the Standard

I keep coming back to those three words. “I wanted him around.” Kobe on the bench didn’t score a point. But his presence on the sideline changed how every Laker prepared. Patty Mills said Tim Duncan’s presence “makes you put your alerts up and your ears stand up.”

You know this feeling. The senior engineer whose name on a code review makes everyone refactor before they submit. Nobody told them to. The bar just moved. The data architect whose presence in the pipeline review means people check their contracts before anyone asks. The standard is implicit, not enforced.

Don’t let your senior people fade into the background because they’re “not shipping this sprint.” Their presence IS the shipping — of standards, of culture, of the bar.

Put their name on the review rotation. Make them the decision owner for a domain. Make their presence structural, not optional.

The Modern Diminisher

Now flip it. The manager who reviews every PR themselves, answers every architecture question before the senior IC sees it, sits in every data review because “context.” Their most talented people rubber-stamp reviews and write code two levels below their capability.

There’s a new version of this trap. AI reviews code now. AI flags architecture issues. So why put senior engineers in the film room at all?

Because AI made the judgment gap worse. Production success rates hit a five-year low this year. Teams are writing more code and failing more often. The bottleneck isn’t generating code anymore. It’s knowing whether the code should ship. That’s judgment. AI doesn’t understand your system’s unwritten rules. It doesn’t feel the blast radius. That’s what your senior engineers provide. And it’s the manager’s job to protect their time for exactly this work. Not bury them in low-leverage tasks.

Here’s what nobody talks about: AI creates an ownership gap. Engineers are starting to say “the AI wrote that” in postmortems. Not my code. Not my problem. That’s where the energy, the presence, the human fabric of a team matters more than it ever has. AI amplifies whatever foundation you have. If your senior people aren’t in the room, AI amplifies mediocrity at machine speed.

Where the Scoreboard Changes

I see this in my managers. I see it in my teams.

The leader who reviews every PR because it feels productive. The one who answers every architecture question in Slack because it’s faster. I’ve been that person. The scoreboard said “what did you build?” and we kept playing that game long after the job changed.

The hardest part isn’t the framework. It’s the identity shift. You built your career on being the person with the answers. Now the job is building the system where other people find them. That shift happens at every level. IC to senior IC. Manager to director. And it never gets easier, because the instinct to do it yourself never fully goes away.

There’s a crude metric that floats around engineering circles. PRs written versus PRs reviewed. People have strong opinions about it, and the numbers alone don’t tell you much. But the direction they point? The more senior you go, the more your impact shows up in other people’s work. Not yours.

I won’t pretend the organizations have caught up. Most promotion frameworks still reward output. Most performance reviews don’t have a line for “ran the postmortem that prevented the next outage.” That’s a real gap. But the best leaders I’ve worked with figured out how to make influence visible. And how to fight for their people when the system didn’t.

That’s what coaching is. You stop keeping score for yourself. And you make sure the score counts for the people doing the work.

The Question

Think about the most senior people on your team right now.

Are they running the film room? Setting the energy? Raising the standard?

Or are you trying to play every position while they sit on the bench?

So here is my question to you: are you coaching, or are you playing?

#Leadership #EngineeringManagement #NBA #Multipliers #CultureAndTeams