Are People Your Biggest Problem?

Is most of your time every day at work spent solving people problems or craft problems?

That single question is a compass. It tells you whether your energy is going into navigating collaboration dysfunction or into building something that actually matters.

Because being good at the people stuff can feel like progress, and in most environments, it is what buys you influence, respect, and speed. But it can also become a seductive detour, a distraction. It rewards maneuvering through complexity instead of reducing it.

Getting good at people stuff makes you better at surviving and maneuvering. You become someone who can get decisions made, avoid landmines, and shape the battlefield.

Getting better at the craft makes you better at the actual work. The product. The insight. The complexity of systems and the details. The thing that customers actually experience.

You need both to lead well. But too many people in leadership plateau because they overinvest in the social engineering part, like org design, stakeholder mapping, or influence games, while their core muscle of domain excellence starts to atrophy.

The best leaders use people skills to create conditions where craft can thrive, not to cover for the lack of it.

The upgrade path often looks like this:

• Junior: Craft rich and politics blind
• Mid-level: Learning influence, losing some craft edge
• Senior: Mastering influence, and then arriving at a fork where you either choose to spend time on politicking, or choose to go back to craft

Expertise is a function of time. And you want to watch where yours goes. There comes a time in your career where it’s too comfortable to wallow in people stuff and end up ignoring craft for too long.

Don’t make that mistake. Especially as a leader.