Steffen Heilmann is a firm believer in empowering his people and giving them opportunities to grow. During his early weeks as CTO at Aroundhome, he and his staff were heading into an important negotiation with their data center provider to take over responsibility of a mission-critical database.

Steffen had confidence in the abilities of his head of ops to take full ownership of the process, so he said something to the effect of, “You handle it.”

A few days later, however, he sensed something was off. When he sat down with his head of ops to learn more, Heilmann realized the misunderstanding. Instead of feeling empowered, his head of ops felt abandoned—as if his boss were simply offloading all the responsibility and pressure onto his shoulders.

This was far from the case. In fact, Heilmann had plenty of negotiating experience and was only too willing to share his expertise.

Ah, the challenge of translating leadership concepts from theory into practice.

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