[closeparen]

Power comes from:

a) coworkers respect your competence & judgement so they align with your decisions on technical matters

b) engineering manager believes what you have to say about what the project needs, which may include staff allocation & performance management

[baron_harkonnen]

Sounds like you've never worked at a startup where the CEO walks in one day and says "we're changing direction" everyone stops what they're doing and desperately tries to turn the boat around, only to have that happen again two week later...

Like it or not, that is what power is.

Building respect and trust is great, but you can have all of these things and not have any real power. I've seen trusted respected people let go in a heartbeat when times are tough. The people that can decide to 'let people go' are the ones with power.

In my experience tech leads and middle managers often have to do the difficult task of balancing the whims of power with sound technical decisions. This is a hard task because it's frankly much easier to just bow to the whims of leadership and wait for the day when they decide a "shakeup" is needed and layoff most of middle management.

[solidasparagus]

I mean that's not really power if your staff quits on you after you do that. If you want to be able to pull off those sorts of pivots successfully, you need your coworkers to respect your competence and judgement.

[scarface74]

If you don’t trust or respect the CEO you leave.

Could any other CEO have come into Apple in 1997 and done what Jobs did? They respected Jobs more than they would have a generic CEO.

Heck didn’t the Pandora CEO convince people to work for two years with no pay?

A number of us stayed at a startup until the bitter end because the leadership was completely honest with us and the investors promised to pay us for every hour we worked.

[Scarblac]

And therefore not from a "tech lead" title.

Edit: I'm saying this because I decided to stop being "tech lead" recently, precisely because of the problem of responsibility without authority.

Yes, people respect me and my decisions, up to a point (we have several very competent people and we don't always all agree) . They did that before I was tech lead and to the exact same amount after. My work did not change one iota compared to what I was doing before. But suddenly I got blamed for some things that I had no power to prevent.

That's just not healthy.