Your IT Leadership Legacy Starts Now

When you move into your first IT leadership role, or even as you start moving up the leadership ladder, you probably aren't thinking about your legacy.

That’s for the end of your career, right? Actually, no. Whether you mean to or not, you’re already building your legacy.

However, it won’t be defined by how many systems you deployed, how many tickets you closed, your monthly metrics or how many answers you thought you had. Your legacy will be defined by how your people describe you when you’re no longer in the room.

• Did you listen?
• Did you trust them?
• Did you make it safe to tell the truth?
• Did you value their input?

Great Leaders Create Space for Truth

The best IT leaders know they don’t have all the answers and that collaboration is the key to success. They understand the need for honest feedback. They invite dissenting views. They welcome the person who says, “Hold on… what if we’re missing something?”

They build trust and collaboration across every layer of their team, from service desk technicians to security engineers, from analysts to architects.

And most important, they listen without being defensive.

Why? Because the information they need to make the best decisions doesn’t come neatly wrapped on a dashboard — it comes from people.

When truth is welcomed:

• Risks are surfaced early.
• People invest more deeply.
• Teams make smarter, faster decisions.

Confidence vs. Hubris

As you gain experience, your confidence will grow and that’s a good thing. But confidence is not the same as hubris.

• Confidence is rooted in self-awareness. It says, “I trust my ability to make good decisions and I’m open to other perspectives.”
• Hubris is rooted in ego. It says, “I already know the answer and I don’t need your input.”

Confident leaders invite feedback. They know they don’t see everything. Leaders driven by hubris shut it down. They interpret silence and compliance as agreement.

The hubris-driven leader fails to check their ego at the door, convinced they’re the smartest person in the room and the room stops talking. That’s when small issues stay hidden, risks go unchallenged and people protect themselves instead of the mission.

One builds trust. The other breaks it.

The Cow Pie Principle (Yes, Really)

As experienced IT leaders will tell you, it’s not usually the big, visible landmines in the field that trip you up. It’s the small, messy, hard-to-see cow pies.

Yes. I said cow pies. These are the completely avoidable failures, the ones someone absolutely could have warned you about, if only they had felt safe enough to do so.

When you build a culture of trust:

• People speak up.
• They spot the small risks before they grow.
• They challenge plans that aren’t fully baked.
• They tell you when something feels off, even if it contradicts your view.

Want to avoid cow pies? Make it safe to speak the truth.

How to Manage Post-Incident Reviews

Even with a healthy culture, mistakes will happen. As an IT leader, you’ll be part of post-incident reviews and retrospectives, events that should be the opportunity for the team to turn failure into learning.

But it only works if the space is safe.

If people fear being blamed, those sessions become worthless. Worse, they teach the team to stay quiet next time.

The worst retrospective I ever saw? An executive threatened to fire everyone if the issue happened again.

In that moment, the team didn’t get better. It got quieter.

A culture of fear doesn’t prevent mistakes, it guarantees more of them.

Great leaders use reviews to:

• Understand, not punish.
• Surface blind spots, not assign blame.
• Reward honesty, not perfection.
• Focus on improvement.

The purpose of a retrospective isn’t to point fingers. It’s to make sure next time, you don’t step in the same cow pie twice.

5 Practical Habits for Managers

Here’s how to start building a team that trusts you:

1. Ask for input and mean it.
   Don’t seek applause or agreement. Try: “What am I missing?” or “What concerns you most about this plan?”
2. Normalize challenge.
   When someone pushes back, thank them. Model curiosity over control.
3. Respond, don’t react.
   If feedback is hard to hear, pause. Don’t explain or defend. Listen. Ask questions.
4. Celebrate risk-raisers.
   People who surface risks are guarding your blind spots. Shine a light on that behavior.
5. Don’t mistake silence for alignment.
   A quiet room isn’t agreement, it’s a red flag.

The Leadership Legacy You Want

Great leadership isn’t about controlling outcomes.

It’s about creating an environment where great outcomes are possible; where good people grow, innovation thrives and truth is never punished.

You want your legacy to be a team that’s energized, courageous and unafraid to do the right thing, especially when it’s hard.

That’s the kind of leadership people remember for the right reasons.

That’s leadership worth following.