In Information Technology, the focus is rightly on successful outcomes: delivering products & services, managing budgets, and driving business value. Yet, achieving these goals in an increasingly complex technical landscape requires a specific kind of wisdom at the top, what I call “firsthand knowledge”.

I’ve spent my career working deep within the technical systems that power our organizations. Like many in technical roles, I’ve observed firsthand how effective leadership often hinges not just on management skills, but on a leader’s foundational understanding of the work itself.

The True Value of Experience

It’s often assumed that a leader’s job is to manage the process of work, delegating the details to their teams. While delegation is crucial, a lack of deep, firsthand knowledge creates a significant gap between strategy and execution. This knowledge isn’t about being the most technical person in the room; it’s about having a proven, practical understanding derived from direct experience.

For an IT leader, Firsthand Knowledge means:

• Understanding Scale: Grasping the true complexity and effort involved in scaling a system or making a major architectural change.

• Assessing Risk: Being able to quickly and accurately evaluate the difference between a minor technical hiccup and a major systemic threat.

• Judging Feasibility: Having an intuitive sense for whether a vendor’s promise or an internal project timeline is realistic, based on past experience with similar challenges.

The Risk of Over-Reliance

When leaders lack this foundational experience, they become overly reliant on summarized reports and filtered interpretations from their teams. This creates a reliance trap that hinders agility and confidence:

• Decisions Slow Down: Without the ability to quickly validate assumptions, leaders must ask for endless rounds of documentation and meetings, delaying crucial choices.

• Blind Spots Emerge: The focus shifts away from the genuine, day-to-day operational friction and onto high-level metrics that may not reflect the real health of the technical estate. The organization ends up optimizing the wrong things.

• Disconnection Grows: A gap widens between the strategic priorities of the leadership team and the operational realities of the technical staff. This leads to missed opportunities and wasted effort on initiatives that seem good on paper but fail in execution.

Building Bridges, Not Walls

The best outcomes occur when business acumen and technical expertise are woven together at the leadership level. The goal isn’t to turn every manager into an architect, but to ensure that our organizational structures value and prioritize people who have been in the arena, those whose hands-on experience allows them to ask the right questions and make confident, informed bets for the future.

By integrating leaders with firsthand knowledge, we don’t just improve morale in the technical ranks; we make better decisions, increase our speed of execution, and ensure our technology strategy directly serves the core needs of the business. Prioritizing this blend of expertise is the clearest path to a more resilient and high-performing IT organization.