Every failed IT project has a post-mortem. Every post-mortem identifies "communication issues" and "unclear requirements" as root causes. Nobody ever writes "our leadership was incompetent" in the official report, but that's usually the truth.

Here's what poor IT leadership actually looks like:

They confuse activity with progress. Daily standups, weekly syncs, biweekly planning sessions, monthly reviews. Everyone's in meetings all day. Nothing ships. Leadership sees full calendars and thinks the team is productive. They're not. They're suffocating.

They delegate decisions, not authority. You're responsible for the architecture, but you need approval for every technical choice. You're accountable for the timeline, but you can't say no to feature creep. You own the delivery, but you don't control the scope. This isn't leadership. It's theater.

They treat estimates as commitments. You say "probably three weeks" in a hallway conversation. Two days later it's a deadline in a stakeholder presentation. When you miss it, you're "not a team player." When you pad estimates to protect yourself, you're "not ambitious enough." You can't win because the game is rigged.

They solve people problems with process. Team isn't communicating? Add a meeting. Deployments are buggy? Add a sign-off step. Estimates are wrong? Add a planning ceremony. Each new process is a band-aid on a bullet wound. The real problem is they hired the wrong people or created a culture where honesty is punished.

They're absent when you need them, present when you don't. Silent during planning when you need strategic direction. Suddenly micromanaging implementation details they don't understand. They disappear when you need air cover from unreasonable demands. They materialize to question your technology choices in front of stakeholders.

The worst part? These leaders genuinely think they're doing a good job. They're "empowering" the team. They're "staying involved." They're "holding people accountable."

No. You're creating chaos and calling it leadership.

Real leadership in IT projects is simple: set clear goals, trust competent people to achieve them, remove obstacles, and take responsibility when things go wrong. That's it. Everything else is just noise.

But simple doesn't mean easy, and most leaders would rather add another meeting than do the hard work of actual leadership.