Top of mind

As engineering organisations grow, leadership context becomes increasingly concentrated. Directors and VPs move across strategy, delivery, customers, hiring, organisational design and operational issues, often within the same week. The wider organisation sees the resulting decisions and changes in direction, but not always the information or trade-offs behind them.

That gap matters. Priorities can feel obvious to leaders because they have been discussed repeatedly in meetings and smaller conversations. To everyone else, they may appear suddenly through a roadmap change, a new request or a shift in leadership attention. Without the wider context, people are left to interpret those signals for themselves.

I have started sending the engineering organisation a short message every Friday called “Top of mind”. It outlines where my attention has been during the week, which problems I believe matter most and anything broader that I think the organisation would benefit from understanding.

It is not intended to be a status report or a record of everything I have done. The organisation does not need a summary of my calendar. It needs insight into what I am seeing across the system and how that is influencing my priorities.

Leadership attention is a powerful organisational signal. People notice which subjects repeatedly appear, where leaders become more involved and which problems receive urgency. Those signals influence decisions and behaviour, even when no explicit direction has been given. Making the reasoning more visible reduces ambiguity and helps distinguish between work that is urgent, work that is strategically important and work that is simply consuming time.

This becomes more important as the organisation scales. Senior leaders cannot and should not make every decision. Their responsibility is to create enough shared context for other people to make good decisions independently. Engineers can make better technical trade-offs, managers can direct attention towards the most important outcomes and teams can recognise when local optimisation is working against a wider goal.

The weekly message also creates accountability for me. It forces me to reflect on whether my time matched the priorities I communicated, whether I focused on the problems that required my involvement and whether I created clarity or added more ambiguity. There will be weeks where the answer is uncomfortable, particularly when reactive work has displaced more important priorities, but that is part of the value.

The format needs to remain lightweight. It should be direct, honest and useful rather than polished or exhaustive. Some weeks it may focus on a major programme. Other weeks it may cover reliability, customers, organisational behaviour or an area where my own thinking is still developing.

The aim is simply to make leadership less opaque. People should not need to reverse-engineer priorities from fragmented Slack conversations, calendar activity or the latest urgent request. They should have a clearer understanding of what their leaders are focused on, why it matters and how that should influence the decisions they make.