I Tried to Do Everything Myself. Then I Burned Out. Leadership Fixed It.

Leading a team means your job stops being "know everything" and starts being "make everyone around you better." I learned this the hard way - by trying to do everything myself first. Reviewing every PR. Jumping on every incident. Being the single point of failure for an entire platform. The trap looked like value: I was the only one who understood the CI/CD pipelines. Every incident escalated to me. Documentation lived entirely in my head. Vacation was a concept, not a reality. I thought being indispensable made me valuable. It didn't. It made me the worst thing you can be in DevOps: a single point of failure. And then the burnout hit - not the "I'm so passionate" kind, but the kind where you stare at a screen and nothing is happening behind your eyes. The shift that changed everything: from fixing everything myself to teaching others how to fix. Knowledge moved from my head into runbooks. PR reviews became review guidelines. Incident heroics became documented response procedures anyone could follow. The team went from waiting for my approval to proposing solutions before I even knew there was a problem. Pair debugging sessions replaced lectures. Code reviews became teaching…