The validation isn't coming
Tech leaders don't get a clear yes
Michael Greenspan · June 16, 2026 · 4 min read A lot of the engineering managers and leaders I talk with want to know that what they’re doing is right.
Their own manager isn’t around much. The 1:1s get booked and then canceled. The feedback that’s supposed to tell them whether they’re pointed the right way just doesn’t arrive. And without it, a particular anxiety sets in: if no one is telling you whether the work is any good, how do you know it’ll be valued by the people who eventually will?
It can run in the background for weeks. You make a call, ship a plan, set a direction, and there’s no one to tell you whether any of it was the right move. And this constant open-endedness and lack of closure weighs on you.
”Just tell me it makes sense”
Recently, a leader I was coaching said it plainly.
“I just want you to tell me that what I’m doing makes sense.”
I understand why. He wanted my read on his initiatives, and when the feedback you actually need isn’t coming, it’s a relief to have someone, anyone, say: yeah, that tracks.
Wanting that is reasonable. When you’re responsible for a team and no one above you will say whether you’re on track, reaching for confirmation is the responsible-sounding move. Of course you want to know the work isn’t going to waste.
But I didn’t give it to him, at least not yet. I told him he could have my opinion later if he still wanted it. First I asked him something else.
What is my feedback going to do for you? Will your manager care, three months from now at review time, that Michael said your plans made sense, if he doesn’t agree with them?
He sat with it.
No, he said. His manager wouldn’t care.
What happens even if I say yes
So we followed the thread. Say I tell him it all makes sense to me. Then what?
He was honest about it. “I’m probably going to keep exploring. Keep coming up with new plans. Keep wondering whether what I’m working on is right.”
That’s the part worth slowing down on. He could ask me. He could ask ChatGPT. He could turn it over by himself for hours. But the validation he was actually after could only come from his manager and his team, the people whose read on the work would eventually count. And that wasn’t coming.
So every “yeah, makes sense” he collected from anywhere else left him exactly where he started.
The seeking has a cost of its own. As long as he believed the validation was on its way, he’d keep chasing it: more plans, more second opinions, more doubt, more anxiety, all of it standing in for the work he already believed in.
When you stop waiting
What shifted wasn’t his situation. His manager didn’t suddenly show up. The feedback didn’t arrive. Nothing outside of him moved.
What moved was that he let himself see it: the validation is not going to come from the place it matters most. And once that’s accepted, the question quietly changes. It stops being is this right and becomes something he can actually act on. Can I trust my own judgment and execute the plans I already think are the most impactful, instead of generating new ones to quiet the doubt?
Does that guarantee a good performance review? No. It doesn’t.
But it sets down a weight he’d been carrying without naming it: the weight of waiting for something that, in his situation, was never going to come.
What was left, once he stopped waiting, was permission to do the work he already believed in.
No sign-off was coming. He got to work.
Thanks for reading. If there’s a call this week that’s yours alone to make, I hope this gave you a little more room to trust it.
— Michael
Something I’m building →
Like the leader in this piece, most engineering managers make their hardest calls alone. The Engineering Leadership Retro is a small, closed group built for exactly that: a place to sharpen your own judgment, not to collect a “yeah, that makes sense.”
The first group is capped at six, at a founding rate, and launches soon.