I Added a Meeting to Feel Like a Leader

A release broke payments for 10 minutes. So I added a meeting. Release retrospective. Every deployment gets a review. Sounds like leadership. Here's what actually fixed the problem. I got into the logs with the developer who shipped the feature. It was a high priority release and I wasn't going to sit on the sidelines checking in on Slack. I wanted to be in it with the team. Turns out the third-party payment provider had different config settings in production than in their dev and staging environments. The fix came from reading logs. Not from a meeting. But I created one anyway. A release retrospective. Every deployment gets a review going forward. One incident, and I built a recurring process around it. Not because the data told me to. Because it felt like the responsible thing to do. That's the trap. Reactive process dressed up as proactive leadership. The Meeting That Was Already Dead 99% of our releases went smooth. Every week the team showed up, confirmed nothing went wrong, and