On Leadership: Dialing Your Translucency

Most leadership advice tells you to be more visible. What it doesn’t tell you is when to dial that visibility down - and why doing so might be the most important thing you do for your team.

The Hero Trap

Early in my career, I worked under two different leaders on similar consulting engagements. Both projects originated through the leader’s relationship with the customer. Both leaders wanted the project to succeed. Their approaches differed completely.

Kevin handled all aspects of the customer relationship himself. Escalations, updates, strategic conversations - he managed everything so the team could focus on delivery. His intention was good: protect the team from distraction.

The project succeeded. But the team’s ability to build their own relationships was curtailed. We were viewed as commodities - interchangeable resources executing someone else’s vision. When opportunities arose during the engagement, we couldn’t see them because Kevin sat between us and the customer.

Mary took a different approach. She pushed me forward as the central person responsible for success in the customer’s eyes. She traded “free from distraction” for “increased ownership responsibility.”

The result: more people built relationships with the customer. The team gained trust and was seen as critically valuable, not replaceable. Those relationships translated into additional projects that Mary didn’t need to shepherd. Her team generated opportunities autonomously.

Both leaders wanted success. Kevin’s protection limited growth. Mary’s approach scaled.

Leadership Translucency

Think of leadership visibility like an alpha channel in graphics. At an alpha of 1.0, you’re fully opaque - the hero, everything running through you. At an alpha of 0.0, you’re fully transparent - the team owns everything, and you’re not visible in their success.

The goal isn’t to reach zero. It’s to move deliberately along the spectrum based on what the situation needs. Different contexts call for different alpha values. Early-stage work requires high alpha - you’re often the expertise and the decision-maker. Mature teams with established capabilities need much less.

This framing helped me understand something important: leadership visibility isn’t binary. It’s a dial you control intentionally.

The Asymmetry

Here’s what took me longer to learn: your alpha should be asymmetric by situation.

When things go well: Dial down. Let the team own the success. They should feel they did it themselves.

When things go wrong: Dial up. Step forward. Take responsibility. Provide air cover.

A bad leader will do the inverse of this. They claim credit for wins and deflect blame for losses. The approach I’m describing does the opposite - and it’s what teams actually need. Autonomy when things work. Support when things are hard.

On one project, I was leading development of a web application that integrated with multiple external systems. I had positioned my tech lead, James, as the central person (intentionally applying what I had experienced from Mary’s approach years earlier in my career).

James was an excellent engineer. He could break down technical tasks, communicate issues clearly, lead other engineers effectively. But he had less experience raising issues that required decisions outside his team’s boundaries. When the team struggled to get stable API specs from integration partners, James knew the problem existed but didn’t escalate its criticality. By the time this became visible at a higher level, we couldn’t avoid project delays.

At the root of it, I had put James in this position. I hadn’t established adequate touchpoints to catch this earlier. When the situation surfaced, I stepped forward and took responsibility for not establishing those communication triggers. I didn’t want this to tarnish James’s reputation.

But I also stepped forward for a more important reason: to redirect criticism to the actual failure point. The problem wasn’t technical ineptitude. It was communication flow - and that was my responsibility. If people were going to criticize something, it should be the right something.

James learned about cross-team communication with the right level of clarity and the right kind of criticism. And our relationship grew. We had respected each other before. Times like this bring respect to trust.

What Low Alpha Actually Looks Like

Dialing down doesn’t mean disappearing. It means creating conditions where good things happen without you directing every action.

I worked with an engineer named Jaime on a significant technical proposal. She was going to be the lead engineer, but she lacked experience with this level of planning - breaking down architecture into estimatable tasks, mapping dependencies, projecting team structure and cost, estimating five-year total cost of ownership.

Jaime did excellent work on the technical architecture. Then I guided her through the rest: task breakdown, skill set requirements, parallelization opportunities, stakeholder involvement, infrastructure assumptions.

I could have completed the plan faster by taking her architecture and building the rest myself. That would have prevented a hands-on learning opportunity. So I invested the time in guidance.

When we presented our overall approach for approval, the technical architecture was actually a small part of the discussion. Most of it was timeline, cost, and tradeoffs - areas where I had guided Jaime through the thinking. But by then, she understood all of it. She presented to stakeholders while I sat in the back, ready to help if needed.

That’s low alpha. Present but not visible. Available but not central.

Positioning Jaime as the central figure in that presentation did more than get approval for the project. It increased her confidence - she had now done this end-to-end. It deepened her understanding - she had to know the material well enough to speak to it. It built mutual trust between us - I showed I would champion her growth, and she showed she could step up. And it built stakeholder trust in Jaime - they saw her as a critical figure, not someone who contributed a small piece.

Now she can do this again without me.

The Paradox: How Do You Get Credit?

If you’ve dialed down and the team succeeds, you risk being viewed as unnecessary. This isn’t about ego. Leaders need standing to get resources, influence, and the mandate to keep developing people. So how do you get credit without taking it from your team?

The answer is that visibility is both audience-dependent and topic-dependent.

To your team: dial down. They own success.

To your leadership: be visible differently. Not “look what I did” but “here’s the system I built and how it performs.”

At one organization, we hired new graduates from universities. Initially they struggled, and there were talks of reducing or eliminating new-grad hiring entirely. I took this as a signal to tune the system - restructuring what we looked for when hiring, refocusing onboarding to get new grads productive quickly while pairing them with mentorship and long-term growth objectives.

Over time, project managers started reporting successes: “These new engineers are a lot better than past years.”

That was my opening. Not to claim their work, but to take credit for the system changes that enabled their success. “I restructured how we hire, onboard, and integrate new graduates.” The engineers got credit for being great. I got credit for the conditions that helped them succeed. Both are true. They don’t conflict.

The framing matters. “I led the team to success” claims the outcome. “I created a system where the team could succeed” describes your actual contribution and leaves their credit intact.

The Organizational Reality

This isn’t just a personal challenge - it’s an organizational one.

Organizations that measure individual accomplishment naturally push leaders toward high alpha. If your performance review emphasizes personal contributions, you’re incentivized to ensure credit flows to you early and often. High alpha becomes rational behavior, not character flaw.

Organizations that measure team accomplishment create space for low alpha. When your success is tied to the group’s success, developing others and stepping back becomes aligned with self-interest.

Some might feel as though competition is the problem; it isn’t. We want people striving to be their best, and competition is better than anything at motivating that. But the framing matters: what’s good for the team needs to be what’s good for the individual. When those align, leaders can afford to dial down. When they conflict, hero leadership persists regardless of its costs.

How you dial your alpha - and in what contexts - directly influences the surrounding culture. High-alpha leaders create environments where visibility is currency. Low-alpha leaders create environments where capability is currency. Both spread. Organizations that recognize this can be deliberate about which behaviors they incentivize.

The Transition

Dialing down is uncomfortable. Your ego has to be okay with the team not knowing what you did. You have to trust people to make mistakes you could have prevented. And you have to have faith that success will still come back to you - which runs counter to the experience many of us have had.

To gain personal success through lower alpha, you need to be in an environment that recognizes the value of growing others and scaling through distributed autonomy. Not every organization does.

And you have to know when to dial back up. The James situation taught me that. I had dialed down too far on communication touchpoints. Learning to read when the team needs more support - and providing it before problems become visible - is part of the skill. This self-awareness is critical: in most organizations, overly high-alpha leaders are viewed more favorably than overly low-alpha leaders. The costs of dialing too low are often greater than dialing too high.

Early-stage contexts require higher alpha. Turnarounds require stepping in. New team members need more visible guidance initially. The goal is to earn your way back to low alpha as quickly as responsible.

How I Read My Alpha Dial

Knowing where you are on the spectrum requires paying attention to signals. Here’s what I watch for.

Signs my alpha is too high:

Meetings get canceled when I’m on vacation - either because no one can facilitate them, or because they’re “for me” rather than “for the team”
Questions about the team are directed to me instead of to the team
Decisions wait for my input even when others have the context to decide
When I return from time off, there’s a backlog of things that “needed me”

Signs my alpha is too low:

The team is thrashing - confusion about priorities, unclear direction, work that isn’t valuable from anyone’s perspective
Issues escalate externally before I’m aware of them
Low observability from outside the team - stakeholders don’t know what’s happening until it’s a problem

That last one deserves attention. There’s a direct analogy between observability in microservices and observability in teams. For services, you need visibility into key events - errors, latency, throughput - without seeing every internal operation. For teams, stakeholders need visibility into status, risks, and outcomes without attending every standup or reviewing every PR.

Too much observability is micromanagement. Too little is surprises and lost trust. Part of leadership is calibrating what outsiders need to see and ensuring they see it - either by providing that visibility directly or by facilitating communication channels that surface key events.

The Measure

The measure of good leadership isn’t whether the team succeeds when you’re watching. It’s whether they succeed when you’re not in the room - and whether they feel they did it themselves.

Products ship, deprecate, and disappear. The people you developed carry those lessons into everything they do next. That’s where the real impact compounds.

The best compliment I’ve received as a leader came from a team that said, “We did this ourselves.”

They were right. That was the point.