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Writing the doc everyone learns from.
The reference the whole org quotes back to you. Written once, cited a thousand times.
Whether they signed up for it or not. If you manage a horizontal team and you're not helping your ICs find their leadership voice, you're managing a stopover — not a place people build careers.
As stewards of systems, every IC on a horizontal team is a leader in the company — whether they signed up for it or not.
They influence teams they don't manage. They teach concepts most teams have never encountered. They advocate for investments — accessibility, tokens, patterns, contribution paths — that don't show up in a feature launch chart. Every doc they publish is a policy. Every review comment they leave is a standard. Every office-hours session they run is a norm being set.
That's leadership work. It doesn't stop being leadership work because there are no direct reports involved.
Most systems ICs are in the role because they love the craft: the architecture, the tokens, the components, the elegance of a well-considered abstraction. They didn't apply to be evangelists, mentors, or persuaders.
That gap — between "what I was hired to do" and "what the job actually requires" — is where a lot of systems ICs burn out or quietly disengage. Not because they can't do the leadership part. Because nobody told them it was the job, and nobody helped them find their own way of doing it.
That's the manager's work.
Leadership doesn't stop being leadership because there are no direct reports involved.
The common assumption: leadership equals management. If you want to grow, you become a manager. If you don't, you cap out.
That's not the right shape for systems ICs. There's a distinct role I call craft leadership — leading through expertise, not through org chart. It's the growth path that lets an IC keep doing the work they love, at increasing scope, without becoming responsible for headcount they don't want.
These aren't ranked. They're different jobs. Both are leadership.
The shapes are concrete. None require direct reports. All of them require someone doing the work publicly and consistently.
The reference the whole org quotes back to you. Written once, cited a thousand times.
The talk that changes how three teams approach the same problem.
Trusted enough that the question comes early — when it's still cheap to answer.
A new subsystem model, a new contribution path, a new way of measuring impact.
Not "training a report." Bringing someone up who might one day replace you at scope.
Or performance. Or inclusive language. Or anything the room wasn't going to prioritize on its own.
My job as their manager isn't to make my ICs into copies of me. It's to help each of them find their own unique version of leadership, and how to best express it. That's the phrase I keep coming back to: authentic leadership voice. Some ICs lead through documentation. Some through relationships. Some through public writing. Some through relentless in-room advocacy. All of it counts.
The way I find it is the same every time: I ask.
Once we find the answers, we build clear, concrete steps to grow into them. Not "get better at leadership" — but "next month, present the new token structure to the platform team, and let's talk after."
Two things make this scaffolding work. Both feel obvious. Neither is the default.
Inside the team: awareness of how the work relates to business priorities, in terms that meet the values of the team. Some ICs care about craft. Some care about impact. Some care about people. Meet them where they are — and translate business language into their language, not the other way around.
Outside the team: awareness of the power of horizontal teams, and how to derive and recognize impact from them. If the rest of the org can't see what your team does, no amount of craft leadership will save your ICs from feeling invisible.
That's why cutting through corporate-speak is a leadership skill in itself — for me, and for the folks I support. You have to be able to link company outcomes to individual values and goals, in both directions, over and over.
Systems teams without craft leadership development follow a predictable pattern:
The contrast is stark. A team that treats craft leadership as a real growth path becomes a place people want to stay — because they can see themselves growing without having to leave the work they love.
The leadership work is the retention work. The retention work is the quality work. And the quality work is why anyone invested in the horizontal team in the first place.
If you're managing a systems team, you're not just running components and roadmaps. You're growing the craft leaders your company can't hire off the open market — because they don't exist ready-made. They're built in the seat, by managers who took the time to notice.