When the System Only Notices You When It Breaks
Self, Role, System: A Developmental Lens for Team Leads in Tech
A few days ago, I received a message asking:
“Do you have a diagnostic for a standard team lead in a tech office?
You know the type: quietly competent, rarely thanked, only visible when something breaks.”
Yes. We do now. And I want to thank the person who asked for it.
Their question captured a common reality: High-performing team leads, especially in technology, often sit in a structural blind spot.
They keep things moving. They solve what others don’t even see. They bridge business ambition with technical constraint. And still, they’re usually overlooked… unless something goes wrong.
So we built a Praxis Q diagnostic just for them.
From Self to Role to System
Every Praxis Q diagnostic is grounded in context, not generic competence.
We begin by asking:
Who is this person, really? (Self)
What are they expected to carry? (Role)
What kind of environment are they navigating? (System)
For the tech team lead, we start with the “quiet geek”: skilled, driven, often invisible.
We then map the leadership demands of the role, which require far more than technical expertise.
And finally, we expose the systemic conditions they must endure:
The matrix of project dependencies,
The misalignment between leadership fantasy and on-the-ground complexity,
And the cultural tendency to only acknowledge cyber, data, or infrastructure work when it fails.
Four Quadrants, Five Thresholds, Real Development
The Praxis Q framework assesses leadership through four developmental quadrants:
Disciplined Delivery – Can you consistently execute under pressure?
Strategic Fluency – Can you align action with purpose and adapt through change?
Adaptive Growth – Can you reflect, unlearn, and evolve how you lead?
Relational Influence – Can you build trust, navigate tensions, and lead across boundaries?
Each quadrant contains structured interview questions, with probes designed to reveal whether the leader is in flow or a threshold state:
Stretched by overload
Tangled in contradictions
Drifting in purpose
Breaking under pressure
Or leaping into something new, unrecognised, and potentially transformative.
Maya’s Story Is Coming
This diagnostic is more than a tool. It’s a glimpse into a leadership philosophy that Maya will soon help bring to life.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll begin sharing this part of her story.
How she moved from execution to reflection.
How she learned to see herself in-role-in-system.
How her understanding of leadership broke and was rebuilt.
And how these exact frameworks helped her develop her team, and herself, in ways her organisation couldn’t yet name.
This diagnostic is intentionally generic, designed to be useful even with limited context. But the real power of Praxis Q comes when it’s tailored to your system, your role, and your leadership story.
If you’d like a version built around your specific challenges, drop me a note. It’s also possible to bundle the diagnostic with a set of coaching prompts. This is especially powerful after you've reflected on your answers and are ready to move forward.
You can explore the Team Lead Diagnostic by downloading the PDF below.
And this part of Maya’s story begins to unfold in just over a month.
Timing. I see McKinsey have now rediscovered humans. I suspect cultural inertia makes their prescription unswallowable, although it will not stop them from writing expensive descriptions ;-) https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-inside-out-leadership-journey-how-personal-growth-creates-the-path-to-success#/
Isn't the demand for a diagnostic the sort of thing we need to resist? I appreciate the provocative questions in it but to me it felt overwhelming and not empowering.