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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Engineering leaders should think like shopkeepers! Regularly scan people, work, and signals – not just tasks.
- A shopkeeper mentality in leadership means treating the business as your own.
- Awareness doesn’t happen by accident, you need to schedule it.
Ask any software engineering leader what their job is, and they’ll give you a version of the same answer: delivering projects, developing people, and driving strategy.
Ask them how they actually spend their time each day and you might notice a paradox between what they believe their job to be and what they’re actually doing. It usually involves back-to-back meetings and reactive problem-solving. The gap between those two things is where most problems grow.
One of the hardest skills to build as a leader is knowing how to protect time for the things that matter most. Making time to get off the execution and reactivity treadmill long enough to step back and ask: How are my people actually doing? Where is there friction? What have I not been seeing?
This practice is part of maintaining a “shopkeeper mentality” – a manner of thinking present in high-performing leaders.
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Think like a shopkeeper
A shopkeeper mentality in leadership means treating the business as your own, maintaining responsibility for the full range of domains that make it run and not just the ones directly in front of you.
Imagine you own a physical store. A real, brick and mortar shop with people, inventory on the shelves, and customers.
Think about what arriving for a day of work would look like in this world. You wouldn’t immediately go heads-down on a single task.
You would scan the whole space as you enter and walk to the back office, noticing things like if the floor is clean, the merchandise stocked, the right staff present and ready to work, whether the window display is pulling people in, and if there are any lingering customers who look like they might need help.
As you quickly catalog what’s going on, you may nudge an employee toward the confused customer. You make a note to reorder a product running low. You notice a new hire struggling with the register and schedule training for later. You clock that last week’s promotion didn’t move the inventory it was supposed to, and make a note to revisit the pricing.
That’s the shopkeeper mentality in action; maintaining high-level awareness and ultimate responsibility of your domain through a practice of intentional scanning.
Why scanning has to be its own task
In the early 1980s, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman studied what set apart the most successful companies in America and published their findings in a book called In Search of Excellence. One of the patterns they identified was that the best managers practiced what Peters and Waterman called “management by walking around” (MBWA).
The concept originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where senior leaders made a habit of physically moving through the workspace: talking to people, observing operations, and picking up on subtle signals that would never make it into a status report.
The managers Peters and Waterman observed were doing exactly what a shopkeeper does. They were scanning the environment: reading the room, checking in on the state of things, and catching small problems before they became big ones. There’s a reason this had to be a deliberate practice, and neuroscience helps explain it.
Research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience identified two large-scale brain networks that are fundamentally antagonistic: the task-positive network (TPN) and the default mode network (DMN).
The TPN activates when you’re focused on a specific problem and supports analysis, decision-making, and execution. The DMN is associated with social cognition, awareness of others, and reading your broader environment. When the TPN is active, it suppresses DMN activity, and vice versa.
What does this mean in practice? The more time spent handling specific problems, the less mental capacity you have available for the kind of broad awareness that scanning requires.
These aren’t just different behaviors, they are different brain states. The HP leaders found success in walking the floor because their brains actually needed that specifically dedicated time and the specifically dedicated brain resources to scan. You cannot do both at the same time, which means maintaining a high-level oversight of your domain isn’t a side effect of everything else you do, it has to be scheduled as a dedicated task.
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When there’s no floor to walk
Remote and hybrid work hasn’t broken the shopkeeper mentality, but it has made it significantly harder, not to mention more important.
In a physical office, you easily overhear conversations, notice body language, and catch the energy of a room at 4pm on a Friday versus 10am on a Monday. In a distributed environment, all of that ambient signal disappears unless you deliberately build systems to replace it, and time to absorb it.
I call my daily, morning scan “manager gathering time”
For 30 minutes before any tasks or meetings start, I cruise the channels. Slack, email threads – not with a goal that I’ll read and be totally clued in on everything going on, but just to get a sense of things. Is someone going quiet who’s usually active? Is there friction in how people are communicating? Is the team collaborating openly on problems or do they seem stuck on something? I’m doing a temperature check and looking for signal and patterns.
Watch the work itself
Sometimes the clearest signal that something is off with a person or a process shows up in the output before it shows up anywhere else. If I step back for a moment, has a team’s delivery slowed at all? Has quality shifted? Are there more or unusual error messages coming through in monitoring channels? Again, this is not specifically checking in on work, but generally scanning your team or organization’s book of work.
Create low-stakes moments of connection
A few times per week I drop into shared channels to ask how people are doing or share something about my day. Without the physical “watercooler,” it’s important to create opportunities for random chatter, and people’s engagement or lack of engagement can give you information about team energy.
Check in on the various domains
In a physical shop, you need to be aware of people and schedule, inventory, customers, sales, and more. What are the similar domains in your world to check in and reflect on? Some of the areas I think about are the wellbeing of individuals within my group, the health of the teams, progress towards strategic goals, the health of relationships with my own leadership, the health of relationships with my peers, and the marketing of my group’s work out to the organization.
It can help to activate your scanning mind in a digital world to write each domain down and write a sentence or two about what you know across each domain.
None of this is complicated, but it is intentional. You have to choose to walk the floor and make time to do it.
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Where leaders get this wrong
The shopkeeper mentality is easy to misconstrue, and the misconstructions tend to run in opposite directions.
On one end, some leaders hear “you’re responsible for everything” and internalize it as “I need to control everything.” They become the shopkeeper who can’t stop rearranging shelves, who hovers over every employee interaction, and who insists on approving every decision because no one else will do it right. That’s not the shopkeeper mentality. That’s a bottleneck, and it’s one of the most common ways managers stall out their own teams’ growth.
Scanning is a light touch across a wide surface. You’re not going deep on every issue – you’re maintaining enough awareness to know which issues actually need your attention and you’re delegating as appropriate.
On the other end, some leaders take a too hands-off approach. They delegate, step back, and assume they’re done, without recognizing that delegation doesn’t transfer accountability.
Delegation transfers work, not ownership. If the shop floor is dirty and a customer slips, it doesn’t matter that sweeping was someone else’s job. You’re the owner. Your job is to maintain enough awareness of your domain and to create systems of support such that nothing too important falls through the cracks.
The takeaway for software engineering leaders
Most software engineering leaders already believe that staying connected to their team and their domain matters. The gap isn’t in the belief, it’s in our calendars. Scanning doesn’t happen as a byproduct of everything else we’re already doing. Our brains won’t let it. It has to be protected time, treated with the same weight as the most important meeting of the day.
So block 30 minutes before the day pulls you under, on a cadence you can commit to. Call it whatever you want. Then defend it like the work it is!
