let's take it apart on our fingers
Who is a team leader?
Let's start with a definition to be in the same context.
Teamlead — a person who leads a team on a project or product.
He helps solve problems and develop employees as specialists. His task is to make sure that everyone works together and achieves common goals. Often, the team leader becomes a buffer between the team and the rest of the world.
I agree with the definition above by about 70%, it is good, it gives an understanding of the picture. I am almost sure that each of you understands in your own way who a team leader is. In development, a team leader helps employees solve problems. For business, this is a specialist who directs the team in the right direction.
Let's figure out what career track team leads grow from. I've seen two options:
Team lead managers. A specialist completes an MBA or another management course, gets a higher education or advanced training, and becomes a manager of developers. I didn't believe in this approach before, because it seemed that if you don't understand the problem at a low level, you won't be able to solve it as a lead. But now I see that this approach works.
Team leads are professionals. A cool specialist (developer, designer, tester, etc.) becomes a leader thanks to developed hardware, software, and emotional intelligence. This option is closer to me.
Why Being a Team Lead Is Really Hard
The point I want to make here is that not everyone needs to become a manager. When choosing this career path, consider whether you are ready to:
Manage a team. It can be unpleasant and difficult. You need to develop people, maintain their morale, promptly resolve issues and help them work more efficiently. There is no ready-made instruction for these tasks: you need to adapt to each team and look for optimal working methods. All people are different. This is the trick of working as a team leader.
Be responsible for the team's work. If the team fails, the team leader will have to answer.
Slow down in professional growth. During team leadership, more time will be spent on developing management skills rather than on deepening development expertise – you need to be prepared for this.
Hire and onboard people. After two or three interviews, all candidates become family, and it is difficult to choose the one who will fit in perfectly with the team. The skill of looking soberly at the hiring process and quickly understanding who will fit in with the team comes with time. But hiring does not end with an offer: it is important to support employees in the first three months, help them fit in with the team, and be a mentor for some time. In addition, the hiring process can become routine and can become boring after a while.
Fire employees. Dismissals are one of the most difficult tasks in the work of a team leader. Sometimes it feels like you are ruining someone's life. But you need to understand that this is not the case, and do it correctly and in an environmentally friendly way.
I will share my view on layoffs. Remember that you are not throwing a person off a cliff, but parting ways because there was no match with the team or project. There are no guilty parties here, for a person this is a chance to try themselves in a new team, where there will be suitable values or work principles.
Advocate for the team's interests in front of stakeholders. This is not only about employment and projects, but also, for example, about the opportunity to get a promotion for an employee or organize an off-site team building for the team, say “we will not do this task,” and so on.
If at this stage you realize that being a team leader no longer seems like a heavenly career path, consider whether you should develop into a career path of a tech lead or senior developer.
Let's return to the topic of our article and see what kind of team leaders there can be.
Types of Team Leads
The classification is based on my experience working with different teams and managers. Let's see what team leaders can be like:
Lone wolf. If something needs to be done well, he will do it himself. There are many of them, these are people who will work a full shift as developers and then solve management problems.
Playing coach. 50% developer, 50% team leader. Gathers a team around himself, controls the execution of all tasks, and does the most difficult ones himself. With a small team, it is possible to meet deadlines, but then team leadership takes up more and more time. Synchronicities with management appear, business tasks require attention, and you need to say goodbye to coding. At some point, I had to do this too.
Wise leader. A billion-year-old team leader, hasn't written code for a long time, but can come with advice because he knows all the methodologies and frameworks. There are few of them, and most likely, this manager will be able to manage not only your team, but also everything possible. Because as a manager, he knows what a team is and how to communicate with it.
Business manager. Understands flexible management methodologies, knows business goals and can explain them to everyone. Agile specialist, scrum master. Immerses himself in the product, has an excellent understanding of technologies, builds processes and helps when the team loses focus. It is often unclear what product he is working on, but deadlines are met.
Seagull manager. Strict, strictly monitors deadlines, understands who does their job well. Side effect: can control every breath. Most often, this is not a permanent role, but a temporary image that you have to get used to.
Advice: If you suddenly notice that you become a seagull manager too often, think about it – do you trust your team? Why do you strive to control every little thing? This is the main problem that needs to be dealt with in order to build comfortable relationships with the team.
We've sorted out the types. Which option is correct?
In fact, none, since each employee requires an individual approach. There are those who really can't live without a magic kick in the ass. There are people who need to be praised all the time, because even if they screwed up, they worry more than you do. It's important to choose the right type at the right time and build relationships with employees in a targeted manner.
In my classification, the types are specially exaggerated to see the positive and negative aspects of each. It is worth highlighting specific techniques and combining them at different stages of working with the team. For example, with new juniors, you will have to interpret the tasks and more clearly control their implementation. Here, this is not micromanagement, but care. As you grow, move to a coach and reach, for example, a wise mentor. In another situation, you need to increase your authority and be a lone wolf, and then help with the processes. Everything depends on the specific situation, and it is better to have all the possibilities in your arsenal.
How to become a team lead?
Let's move on to the main part of the article and start with banal platitudes, but we can't do without them. If you want to grow into a team leader and all my arguments above did not scare you, let's move on. Now you need to assess what skills you lack. When assessing, it is worth differentiating competencies and assessing their level.
The picture shows the pyramid of team leader skills as I imagine it. The upper levels are the most important, the lower ones are less important. It turns out to be an inverted Maslow pyramid for team leader growth.
Learn the basics of project management. Master flexible methodologies, development frameworks, process descriptions, the graphical language for visualizing UML processes, the business process modeling language BPMN, and others. I highly recommend doing this with reconnaissance. For example, if you want to become a team leader in a specific company, study the descriptions of business processes that are used there. Do not forget that there are many methods, they are different, so it is worth learning one, and knowing about the rest at a superficial level.
Useful materials:
“Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers” by J. Hank Rainwater, “Mom, I'm a Team Lead! Practical Tips for Managing a T-Team” by Marina Pereskokova – will help you immerse yourself in the profession.
“Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Hald the Time” by Jeff Sutherland is a good book to understand the essence of agile development.
Develop communication skills. Learn to communicate with colleagues, team, clients.
Feedback. One of the most powerful and at the same time sensitive tools of a team leader. If you give incomplete feedback, the employee can think up the rest, both positively and negatively.
Emotional intellect. Allows the lead to understand the mood of the entire team and each employee individually as accurately as possible and influence the team more effectively. For example, if an employee's motivation has decreased, and he previously talked about personal problems, it is worth individually discussing the work plan for the near future.
Learn time management. When you become a team leader, there are more meetings and communications. Some may have difficulties: simultaneous synchronicities, a disrupted work schedule, or a feeling that you are constantly behind on everything. My favorite advice is to start with a small project for time management. Take a pet project, building a house, or a class at university and plan out the time. Start sticking to it, and you will understand that the task takes up all the hours allotted to it.
Useful materials:
“The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management” by Tom DeMarco is an interesting book about time management.
“Jedi Techniques. How to Train Your Monkey, Empty Your Inbox, and Save Your Thought Fuel” by Maxim Dorofeev – I recommend listening to the audio version, which was voiced by the author himself! This is one of my favorite books in terms of content, it gives an understanding of how to build your intellectual life and why sometimes we quickly run out of steam.
Learn motivational techniques. Create a positive working environment for the team, recognize achievements. Hold 1:1 meetings where a person will receive quality feedback. Maybe even negative, but sometimes it is more important than positive. A smart person will understand how difficult it is to tell a colleague with whom you have been working for a long time, or your child, whom you raised from a junior to a senior, about your mistakes.
Develop risk management skills. You should always take into account that an employee may leave and the project may stop. Think through alternative scenarios in case of sudden changes. In the scenarios, consider the most positive and negative options for the development of events and from them calculate a specific time for resolving the crisis situation.
Learn decision making techniques. Analyze costs and benefits, weigh and assess risks, use special techniques, such as the Eisenhower matrix.
Now to concrete steps.
Find a sandbox. The first and most important step, without which it is difficult to work as anyone. A pet project, a hackathon, or managing the development of a small feature in your work project can become a sandbox. The second and third options are ideal for honing leadership skills and understanding whether you need it. That is, you go to a hackathon, develop a feature in 72 hours, then present it. In the process, you understand whether you are interested in managing a team, what software and hardware you need to upgrade. The same with working on a feature: you initiate the process, are responsible only for your part of the project, and understand whether you are ready to continue doing this.
Tell your boss that you want to become a team lead. Not all managers know or guess that you want something. Often you can see a leader right away, but if he does not tell about his desire, the process will drag on. You can tell about your career goals 1:1. A good manager will hear the desire and help build a development track.
Become a replacement team leader: for the duration of your manager’s vacation or illness. A clear point, I will only note that it is important to agree on such a replacement with the manager in advance. Most likely, he will be happy and calm that everything is fine with the team.
Take on responsibilities above your current position. Try to act like a leader and expand your area of responsibility both on current tasks and outside. For example, at a team building event, volunteer to be a team captain. Even if you don’t like it, try it a couple of times – you’ll be able to figure out whether you like being a leader or not.
If you have grown into a team leader, congratulations, everything worked out. Next, you need to not skip the self-onboarding stage, even if you continue to work with your team. Collected check listso as not to miss important steps, use it.
What to do if you can’t become a team leader
There is always a case when you tried to be a lead and failed. That's normal. Remember that writing code didn't work out right away either, and during your first steps you were hitting corners. Now mistakes are more expensive and bring more emotions. It seems that everything is bad, but in fact, experience helps you figure out whether you like managing a team.
If not, then you can return to the development of hard drives and dig into deep expertise. Several options for who you can become:
Senior Developer / Senior Software Developer
Engineering Manager
Technical Manager / Tech Lead
If you liked it but it didn't work out, maybe you didn't finish something: you didn't prepare fully, you didn't self-onboard, you didn't do some of the previous steps, or you just didn't get along with the team. Don't be afraid to keep trying.
In conclusion, I would like to highlight the main thoughts about the work of a team leader:
This is a complex area that requires a fairly large number of skills from different areas.
Often the ability to lead a team in the right direction is more important than hard skills.
Not everyone needs to be a team leader. There are many interesting and fairly well-paid professions in which leadership and understanding of other people are not so important.
Being a lead is very interesting. The manager influences the process no less, and often more, than the developer.
Tell us, have you ever wanted or tried to become a team leader? Share your experience in the comments.
