Posted on September 9th, 2025.

You’re not failing. You’re just full.

Fires to put out. Tickets are stacking up. Another tool vendor nudging for attention. Two direct reports waiting to “run something by you.” A calendar you never actually own.

It sneaks up on you. Not with a breakdown. Not with a headline. With the slow drift from intentional leadership to endless response.

Many technical leaders don’t realize it’s happened until something external forces a pause—team churn, a blown client renewal, a stalled growth target. But the real warning signs came earlier. The same way a processor starts to throttle under a quiet, relentless load.

The signals are subtle:

• You stop asking why and focus only on when
• Your team waits for decisions they should already know
• Everything feels fast, but nothing moves forward

Leadership requires altitude. Not just awareness, but altitude—enough distance from the day-to-day to name what must change, stop, or shift.

That doesn't mean checking out or floating above the work. It means resisting the gravitational pull of busyness long enough to lead something more ambitious than the next 30 days.

I like to ask CIOs or MSP owners the same three questions:

1. What’s the 12-month shift you’re engineering?
2. What is your team no longer doing—and why?
3. Where are you deliberately spending less time?

If you can’t answer those without stalling, the business may be running, but leadership isn’t steering.

And this is where it gets dangerous.

In IT services, inertia doesn’t look like stillness. It looks like motion without meaning—execution loops without strategic lift. You see effort, not progress. You hear noise, not direction.

You don’t fix that with another dashboard. Or a new quarterly theme. You fix it by resetting the role you play.

Not as a hub. Not as a fixer. Not as the person who knows the most about the tools.

But as the one who sees the shape of what’s next, and insists it gets built.

Let’s get you out of the churn and back into the cockpit.

JP Van Steerteghem

Call me at +1-617-548-3863

or email me at [email protected]

or schedule some time https://calendly.com/jvansteerteghem