In my small journey as a tech lead, I’ve learnt that effective leadership isn’t about issuing commands from an ivory tower. Instead, it’s about redistributing authority while still holding onto accountability. This idea might sound counterintuitive at first --- after all, traditional management put both authority and accountability at the top. Traditionally, managers made all the key decisions (authority flowed top-down) and pushed responsibility for failures onto their teams. But the model I saw bring the best results is different: one where authority goes bottom-up and accountability comes top-down.