High visibility sometimes is confused with strategic importance. Tech leadership roles in a sane org. focus more and more on the strategic than on the tactical.

High visibility sometimes is confused with strategic importance. Tech leadership roles in a sane org. focus more and more on the strategic than on the tactical. Help keep focus on needed projects that cannot be delivered in a short time frame, but are nevertheless needed, sometimes even essential. The ability to deliver short-term value while not derailing long-term goals takes experience to hone, and is one of the tells of a true staff+ engineer. Mentoring is complex. It's not giving lectures (although, sometimes it may help). It's usually more subtle and is typically related to delegation: pick the correct thing to delegate, choose wisely what to do yourself. The trick is to maximize learning and accomplishment of more junior engineers while at the same time not risking team/company objectives. Besides that, providing emotional support and guidance in a way that most managers cannot. You walked the walk, so you help them think on how improve and get where they want to get (even sometimes help figure out what they want). Leadership can also be subtle. Managers tend to equate it with project management (i.e. scrum/whatever, task assignment). On a tech ladder role, leadership is much more about influence than actually telling people what to do. You nudge them in the right direction so the goals are met and they grow (see: mentoring). The best tech leads (staff+ or whatever), get shit done in a way that's sometimes non-obvious, until you miss them. Which makes promotion hard.