[sokoloff]

If I had such a principal on my team, I’d be happy about that. It means that they’ve contributed to an overall team dynamic where the team does not depend on them personally to perform under pressure.

Far worse is a team of on-call juniors who stand around jabbering cluelessly until someone decides to call in Principal Pat who fixes it in 15 minutes during the 7th hour of outage.

If the team is on the right track, providing non-technical support and encouragement is exactly what a principal/director should be doing, to reinforce that the team is performing and earns the credit.

The principal “owns” the annual downtime and problem-loss figures. The team gets credit for this weekend’s fix.

In other words: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” —-Lao Tzu