When Leaders Feel Like They Aren’t Producing Anything

The Invisible Work Of Leadership with Lidia Oshlyansky

What does leadership look like when you’re no longer the one designing, building, or shipping? What happens when your work is a string of conversations, decisions, and nudges—but nothing you can point to and say, “I made that”?

In my recent conversation with Lidia Oshlyansky, a product and UX leader who’s led teams of up to 120 people at Google, Spotify, and early-stage startups, this came up in one of the most honest ways I’ve heard.

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“I sometimes really feel that I don't do anything. There's no artifact to show for it. I did not create a roadmap or a bunch of Jira tickets… I didn't produce anything. And I still sometimes struggle with that.”

Despite the scale of her teams and impact, this feeling of not contributing enough kept resurfacing.

It’s a sentiment I hear often in coaching sessions, especially from leaders transitioning out of hands-on roles: "I used to build things. Now I just talk about them. Am I still adding value?"

This question can feel demoralising in the day-to-day, but in a performance review or interview it can be severely career-limiting if you can’t articulate this clearly.
If you’ve ever sat in a meeting wondering what you actually do anymore, this is for you. You could be the glue holding your org together, but still wonder if you’re ‘doing enough' — and that’s a recipe for burnout.

Reframing the Work

In Lidia’s case, the turning point came from a conversation with a former manager:

“You're really good at empowering and enabling other people, at getting barriers out of the way… Why don't you embrace that skill as an actual skill instead of constantly thinking that you're not contributing anything?”

This reframing helped her recognise what many leaders eventually have to learn: your deliverables are no longer your own individual outputs, they’re the effect you have on your team and peers.

Your leadership value is the outputs they produce together, how those outputs deliver business value, and how the team itself develops over time.

As a leader, the better you get at articulating the desired (and achieved) outcomes, and in helping teams improve their ability to create outcomes by delivering outputs, the better you’ll perform as a leader.

Coaching Over Fixing

When team members bring problems to us, we have a temptation to fix them ourselves. But this moment is the biggest opportunity for engaging and empowering our teams to solve the problems themselves.

Lidia related an experience where she guided her own manager to coach her instead of fixing the problems himself:

“I remember one boss, just wonderful, super intelligent human being, he was a fixer. And so I'd have to go into meetings going, is not for you to fix, this is for us to discuss so you can give me ideas."

She now draws on that experience to guide her own managing and coaching, offering ideas and discussing with her team rather than intervening directly. This also has the advantage of drawing out the ideas of the people who are closer to the work, and so generating better solutions than even an experienced manager can on their own.

Ask Instead of Tell

But of course, as an experienced leader, you often do have ideas, and sometimes they are good ones — and there’s no reason not to contribute them. Lidia also shared a simple habit that helps her share her ideas without dictating solutions:

“Even if you find it easier to come up with a solution, ask instead of tell. Come to your engineers or designers and say, ‘I'm thinking of this as a possible solution. I really need you to tear this apart for me.’”

It’s such a practical way to invite collaboration. By resisting the urge to prescribe, we create space for better thinking—and signal trust in our teams.

This blend of humility and curiosity—combined with a little humour—is what makes her approach so effective.

You’re Not the Smartest in the Room. Good.

Finally, one of my favourite moments from the conversation:

“I have no problem going to my head of ML and saying, 'Explain this to me like I'm a three-year-old.'"

Senior leaders aren’t paid to have all the answers. They’re paid to get the best thinking out of their teams. And sometimes, the best way to do that is to embrace not knowing.

Asking the real experts is exactly how to empower and engage them in their best work, and as a leader, benefit from their insights without needing to develop their level of expertise yourself.

Because if you act as the smartest person in the room on every topic, you’re limiting the capability of your whole team dramatically. Every single person in your team knows things you don’t know, and if you want to have a high performing team, you’ve got to engage their brains fully.

What happens if you keep “doing”?

I’ve seen leaders who never make this shift—who keep trying to prove their value through deliverables. They micromanage product specs, jump into design critiques, or rewrite slides before a team can present them.

On the surface, they look like heroes, always solving problems and saving the day. But their teams are frustrated, disengaged, and ultimately disempowered.

The irony? In trying to prove their value, these leaders erode it.

If you stay anchored in your own output, you crowd out the creativity, autonomy, and accountability of the people around you. You limit the very impact you’re supposed to scale.

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If you're feeling the discomfort of doing important but invisible work, you're not alone. And you're not doing it wrong.

You may just be doing real leadership.

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