The tech boom is over. Tighter capital, fewer hires, and rising board pressure mean CTOs are navigating a new reality: do more with less – and demonstrate your value. The age of “growth at all costs” has ended. Attrition has slowed, and employee movement in the market is fairly stagnant. If you can’t hire your way to build value, how else do you build it?
This was the core question explored at Counter’s Tech Leaders Lunch, expertly hosted by Leanne Fitzpatrick, Director of Data Science & AI at the Financial Times. Leanne brought invaluable insights from both the world of journalism and her day-to-day at the Financial Times, sparking a rich discussion among CTOs and senior tech leaders. From the discussion, five key strategies on how to deliver value in this new landscape emerged:
Redefine Value Beyond Pure Profit
Businesses are being challenged to broaden their definition of value beyond immediate financial returns. This includes ethical considerations, long-term sustainability, and purpose-driven operations. While some established organisations have long prioritised culture, trust, and ethics, particularly when implementing new technologies like AI, businesses in rapid growth phases, especially those with private equity or venture capital backing, often face immense pressure for quick profitability: A “Profit at all costs” mentality. This creates a tension for tech leaders who must balance financial demands with maintaining a healthy, attractive company culture with vision and purpose.
How To Make It Work:
- Ensure tech initiatives reinforce the business’s core purpose and values, balancing immediate financial demands with long-term sustainability and impact to attract and retain talent.
- Champion initiatives that demonstrate value to all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
- Be transparent with financial pressures and direction while reinforcing company values and purpose.
Optimise Existing Talent: The New Growth Strategy
Hiring your way out of problems isn’t always an option anymore. The focus has shifted to optimising existing resources and strategically leveraging tools, including AI. This new reality demands a different kind of engineering manager, one adept at talent retention, effective utilisation of current teams, and even managing underperformers to ensure peak efficiency. This shift also reflects a generational divide, with younger talent less tolerant of high-stress environments and prioritising meaning and belonging over profit at all costs.
How To Make It Work:
- Shift focus from hiring new talent to upskilling and reskilling existing employees to meet evolving needs. Experience around the table shows these individuals often become exceptionally strong software engineers, leveraging their valuable domain knowledge, customer understanding, and a willingness to ‘unlearn to learn’.
- Develop engineering managers with strong people management skills, capable of empowering internal talent and taking on tough conversations when necessary.
- Align work with individual purpose where possible, understanding that younger generations seek more than just a paycheck.
Drive Performance Through Transparency
Apathy often thrives in environments where employees feel like mere numbers, particularly when leaders may unintentionally ‘infantilise’ teams by shielding them from harsh business realities or withholding information they’re capable of handling. Effective leadership, by contrast, involves being candid about challenges and objectives, creating an environment where uncomfortable conversations are not only possible but encouraged. By providing clear context for decisions, leaders empower employees to align with company goals or, if values clash, to seek opportunities elsewhere.
How To Make It Work:
- Practice Radical Candour by being transparent about company goals, challenges, and the ‘why’ behind decisions.
- Create safe spaces for open dialogue, ensuring employees feel heard and understood.
- Empower teams by trusting them with the full picture, building a sense of accountability and buy-in.
Cultivate Ownership and Visibility Across Teams
For teams to truly deliver value, they need clear ownership and the ability to see the impact of their work. This could mean reorganising teams around specific products or end-to-end services, shifting them away from fragmented responsibilities that often diminish their sense of impact. Crucially, it also means creating platforms for teams to showcase their achievements, giving them a voice and demonstrating their direct contribution to business success.
How To Make It Work:
- Reorganise teams around products or end-to-end services to encourage clear ownership and accountability.
- Establish a “golden thread” that visibly connects individual efforts and team output to broader company strategy and company goals communicated by the higher-ups.
- Implement regular showcases or forums for teams to present their work and demonstrate impact.
Adapt Leadership to Diverse Motivations
Understanding what truly motivates people is paramount, and this often varies significantly across different team compositions, especially between onshore and offshore locations. For some employees, particularly those in more privileged positions, work might primarily offer purpose and meaning. However, for others, it’s about the fundamental provision of security and a livelihood for their families. Effective leaders take the time to grasp these differing priorities and adapt their management style accordingly.
It’s worth noting, offshore motivation isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. What resonates with one offshore team might not with another. For example, some offshore teams may place a high value on truth and transparency due to their political environment, while others might be driven by entirely different incentives.
How To Make It Work:
- Adapt your leadership style to cultural nuances, avoiding assumptions that all team members are driven by the same values or metrics. For some teams, hitting “10 tickets” might be as motivating as something that may be considered a ‘grander purpose’.
- If it is part of your long-term strategy, invest in long-term relationships with offshore teams, treating them as integral engineering units, not just delivery contractors, through in-person leadership presence, equal onboarding processes and ceremonies, and reward structures.
The Bottom Line: True Value in Adaptive Leadership
While the current landscape presents significant challenges the consensus was clear: this era is no inherent “gift.” Instead, the true opportunity lies in a leader’s enduring capability.
Delivering value now hinges on empowering people to excel. Fundamental good leadership means being a human, not overcomplicating things, and allowing the majority of employees who want to do a good job to thrive. Effective leaders motivate, engage, and extract value from existing talent, adapting their approach to diverse team structures and individual motivations – whether onshore, offshore, or distributed. This era is a powerful proving ground for tech leaders. Those who champion their teams’ desire for purpose, autonomy, problem-solving, and meaning, while expertly leveraging existing resources to meet business and financial goals, will drive lasting success in 2025 and beyond.
