When "We're Fine" Isn't Fine: The IT Leaders Escape Plan

Everyone in IT knows the "we're fine" lie.
Tickets are moving. SLAs look green. Leaders are quietly answering Slacks at 10:47 p.m. while pretending this is just a "busy season."​

Nothing is on fire. Nothing is scalable either.

This is not a tools problem. It is an architecture problem: the system only works as long as you and your senior engineers are willing to be the safety net.

In a recent episode of The Cool Kids Table Podcast, Paco Lebron of ProdigyTeks described a pattern he sees across the channel: leaders grind so hard inside the business that they become siloed from the ideas that would help them scale it, and they burn out in the process.​

This article is about getting out of that trap with four specific plays you can actually run this week. You will learn how to:

1. Replace hustle with hard boundaries that stick

2. Design a focus time fortress your calendar actually respects

3. Build a capacity feedback engine that reveals real leaks

4. Turn support data into leadership intelligence, not just dashboards

Think of this as a short survival guide for leaders who are done being "fine."

1. Replace Hustle With Clear Boundaries

If your value as a leader is measured in "tickets personally touched," you are not leading a team. You are starring in a live-action help desk role-play.

The job is not "do more." The job is "decide what you should never be doing again."

Research from The American Psychological Association (APA) shows that task switching can eat up 40% of productive time, especially in cognitively demanding work like engineering. Forbes reported that 66% of U.S. workers are experiencing burnout, with heavy workloads and long hours as leading drivers.

The "No Leader Zone"

Start by defining a No Leader Zone: work that should never reach you or your senior engineers under normal conditions. Write it down. Share it. Enforce it.

Candidate entries (pick your top 5):

• Password resets and basic access changes

• "Any update?" status checks

• Simple software installs

• Printer and basic connectivity issues

• "Where do I find X?" questions that a KB could answer

If it feels beneath your most junior tech, it is definitely beneath your principal engineer.

Escalation Guardrails

Most escalation chaos comes from missing structure. Before anything escapes frontline, three things must be true:

1. A runbook or KB article has been followed, step by step

2. Diagnostics are attached: logs, screenshots, environment notes, user impact

3. At least one documented workaround has been attempted

If any of these are missing, the ticket does not escalate. It goes back with a very polite "please complete the basics first."

Yes, it feels slower for a week. Then it gets much faster, because your senior people stop being human search engines.

Time-Blocking Like You Mean It

Two three-hour blocks per week where only true P1 incidents can interrupt you. That is it.

• Use one block for systems and process work

• Use the other for strategic planning, people development, or vendor decisions

Everything else waits. The first time someone pings you during that block, send them the No Leader Zone list. The second time, ask why the system made you the answer instead of the process.

You are not being difficult. You are teaching the organization that your time exists for work only you can do.

2. Design the "Focus Time Fortress"

Deep work is not a nice-to-have in engineering teams. It is the only way complex projects ship. But most calendars look like a Tetris board someone played with their eyes closed.

Your goal: stop pretending people can do architecture in five-minute slices between Slack pings.

Build the Daily Shape

Try this pattern for your senior engineers:

**Sample Day for a Senior Engineer (Tuesday)**

🟢 Green blocks = deep work. 

🟡 Yellow = escalations. 

🔴 Red = true emergencies only.

The Engineer Handshake

To make this stick, you need a trade-off:

• Frontline agrees to own first contact through resolution whenever humanly possible

• Senior engineers agree that every genuinely complex escalation produces something reusable: a script, a doc, a decision record, a new runbook

If an engineer touches a problem twice and has not created an asset to prevent the third time, that is not a hero story. It is a process debt story.

Daily 15, Not 50 Random Slacks

Replace endless interruptions with one short, intentional ritual:

• 10 minutes: yesterday's biggest blockers

• 5 minutes: today's highest-risk tasks

Everything else goes into tickets and runbooks. If it is not worth writing down, it is probably not worth derailing someone's focus block.

Protecting focus is not about putting "no meetings" on the calendar. It is about changing how and when work gets to people in the first place.

3. Build the Capacity Feedback Engine

Most teams feel understaffed. Fewer teams can show exactly where the system is failing.

Instead of saying "we need more people," start asking better questions about the work.

Three Weekly Questions

Once a week, look at your last five to seven days of tickets and ask:

1. Which three ticket types are eating most of our time?

2. How many escalations could the frontline have owned with better tooling or documentation?

3. Where did interruptions do the most damage to project work?

If you cannot answer these quickly, you do not need more headcount. You need visibility.

Turn Questions Into Experiments

Pick one answer from those questions and run a tiny experiment for the next week:

• If password resets dominate volume → test better self-service flow

• If frontline escalates too much → build one decision tree they can own  

• If a specific engineer gets hit constantly → redirect to daily office hour

Do not aim for a transformation. Aim for a 10% improvement in one problem. Then do it again next week.

Scalability is not achieved by one big project. It is achieved by dozens of quietly boring improvements that make it impossible for chaos to win.

4. Turn Support Data Into Leadership Intelligence

Most support metrics get used for reporting, not decisions. That is a waste.

You do not need twenty more KPIs. You need a very small number of metrics that change how you lead.

A Minimalist Metrics Stack

Try starting with these:

• Top 5 ticket categories by volume: Shows where better self‑service or training would actually matter.

• Escalation rate: Shows whether frontline is empowered or just forwarding email.

• Time‑to‑first‑response vs time‑to‑resolution: Shows whether you have a speed problem, a complexity problem, or a focus problem.

Look at them for fifteen minutes every week. If a number moves and nothing in your behavior changes, drop that metric. It is noise.

From Dashboard to Decision

For each metric, ask one question:

• Top ticket type: “What would have prevented half of these from existing?”

• Escalation rate: “What would make frontline comfortable closing more of these themselves?”

• Resolution time: “Is this about knowledge, capacity, or prioritization?”

Then pick one decision: a new runbook, a change to the queue, a tweak to staffing during certain hours, a different way of categorizing tickets.

Repeat that loop. Week after week. That is how support data stops being a vanity dashboard and becomes your early warning system for capacity, burnout, and customer risk.

The Scalability Multiplier

None of this requires a new platform, a budget cycle, or a transformation program with a logo. It requires four things:

1. A written list of work you and your senior engineers will no longer touch

2. Calendar architecture that treats focus as a non-negotiable, not a luxury

3. A simple habit of turning "we are busy" into "here is exactly where the system is leaking"

4. The discipline to let data and community insight change how you lead

These shifts compound:

• Week 1: You set boundaries, and the team learns what is truly theirs to own.

• Week 2: Focus blocks run, and big projects finally move again.

• Week 3: Your capacity engine starts highlighting the real problems, not just the loud ones.

• Week 4: Data and peer insight start shaping your decisions instead of adrenaline.

The Trap Isn't Capacity. It's Architecture

The trap is not that you lack capacity. The trap is that your capacity is wired through you.

As Paco Lebron put it on The Cool Kids Table, "accepting help doesn't erase the work you've already done; it creates the space to expand on it."​

When you replace hustle with systems, “we’re fine” stops being a coping mechanism and starts being an accurate description of an operation that can handle pressure without burning out its leaders.

Next step: do not try all four plays. Pick one. Write it down. Share it with your team. Run it for two weeks. Then adjust.

Scalability is not a personality trait. It is a set of choices you make about how work reaches the people you cannot afford to lose.

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