In the world of enterprise technology there is a pecking order. It all comes down to who has domain admin rights, and who does not. I started my career working on a help desk and then eventually into desktop support. Early on, I wasn’t trusted with such rights, and I didn’t need them to do my job. Even though that made good sense for me to not have any more permissions than I needed, I still longed for that power.

Eventually I rose to an engineering position, with which came domain admin rights! People talk about job perks like paid vacations, health care, flexibility to work from home, etc. A rising technology professional wants one thing: the power to play god over the entire enterprise network!

Within every man and woman is a desire to have power and dominion over something. Unfortunately for geeks, this need goes unmet for a good portion of their lives. Being a geek might be cool now, but when I was growing up, it wasn’t. It generally meant finishing last in any sort of social measure. Finishing last socially gave you very little influence in the world around you.

The sheer power associated with domain admin is exhilarating. Sure, I was picked last in gym class for basketball, but now I can alter the policies governing tens of thousands of computer nodes with a few strokes on my led-backlit mechanical keyboard.  Somehow, everything that’s wrong with the world, has now been set right.

Now for the hard part: giving it up. As I’ve chronicled here previously, I eventually became a manager. That’s not a problem right away. A lot of managers are “working managers.” While they do less of it than the engineers on the team, the manager still has legitimate reasons to put their hands on the keyboard and do actual work. This, of course, has an eventual end. Once I rose to the director level, I had no good excuse for maintaining admin rights. Sure, I still knew what I was doing, and it was tempting to pitch-in or self-serve during the rare occasions when I thought it could be justified, but it wasn’t necessary. I needed to empower and trust my team to do the work.

The funny thing about this, is no one wants to pull admin rights from their boss. Especially a boss that is “one of them” and not an outsider. I’m sure it happens, but it’s got to be an awkward conversation: “Ummm, boss, I was sorta reviewing the admin group, and I was sort of wondering if you, uh, really need your admin rights anymore…” Nobody wants to do that.

The real solution is for technology leaders to willingly lay down their admin rights. I remember the day I did it. I knew it was the right thing to do, because I wasn’t willing to stand before an IT auditor and explain why I needed it. I put in the ticket and waited for my team to deprovision my domain admin account. Then I got the notification that my ticket had been closed and it all sunk-in.

The very thing that separated me from the users was now gone. “I’m just a user.” But, it got worse. When I was an engineer, it was a pain to rebuild my computer. I remember it took weeks to get all my tools reinstalled, and get my preferences tweaked to the point of productivity prior to the rebuild. Now, when I get a new computer, or have it rebuilt, it comes pre-installed with Office and a browser, which happens to be absolutely everything I need to do my job. Wow, times have changed!

Technology leaders that take this journey need not despair. This is not the end of the tale. That craving for power and influence does not need to go unsatisfied. While domain admins can change security configurations for a global organization, that influence cannot cross the air gap from cyberspace to the hearts and minds of the real world.

Technology leaders wield a power of a different kind: Servant leadership inspires, encourages, and motivates. Well-prepared presentations invigorate, unite, and align. Listening builds trust, confidence, and community. Technology leaders, lay down the arms of admin rights, and pick up the mantle of leadership for your technology teams. They need much more from you than your 1337 h4x0r skillz.