Team leader on probation
Hello! My name is Ilya Prakht, I am a trainer on TeamLead, Senior Product Manager, Delivery Manager and COO courses in OTUS. And today I want to talk with you about the trial period of the team lead.
Team leads rarely change jobs, but, as they say, aptly. After all, the complexity of the transition and onboarding increases markedly if you are a leader. This is logical. In addition to your own tasks and getting to know the company, you need to get to know your team, learn how to work with it, gain leadership and the authority of colleagues, thoroughly understand the project, because now you are responsible for it. Leadership expectations from team leads are much higher than from engineers. And in order to justify them, you have to enter the work directly “from the wheels”. There is no time for slacking off.
How to make this process easier, how the team leader can understand the main tricks during the trial period, what tips and life hacks there are in this process – I want to analyze all this in this article. Let’s go!
Step 1 – Understand the Role
First of all, no matter how trite it may sound, you need to decipher for yourself what a team leader is in this particular company. It’s no surprise that the role of a team lead is unique from company to company. Somewhere more people-management. Somewhere more technical management. Somewhere you need to write code, sometimes you need to look after the team and cut into tasks. It is with this proportion that you need to figure it out.
In fact, the team leader has 3 main blocks of tasks:
Team management
Project management
Technical challenges
The classic team leader is a playing coach. And in this case, each task gets approximately equally, 30-35%. This is a spherical team lead in a vacuum. But the percentage of your new company needs to be determined. For what? To properly distribute your time and energy, set the right priorities. So that you focus on exactly what is meant by the corporate and engineering culture adopted in the company.
Step 2 – Understand Leadership Expectations
It’s very cool when they write goals for a trial period right in the offer. And, moreover, not in the true / false format, did / did not, but with some other metrics so that you can monitor progress. For example, increase the team’s average velocity by 50%. Or achieve the closure of at least 80% of project releases on time. Good, clear, measurable, smart goals. It’s a pleasure to watch and perform!
But this is not always the case. I would even say quite rare. Often the goals look something like this: “here’s a team for you, here’s a project for you, do it beautifully.” And what to do in this case?
But this is a very important moment in onboarding. After all, for these very purposes, just the same, the expectations of management from your work are hidden. And at the end of 3 months, this is where their eyes will be turned, it is on these parameters that a decision will be made whether you have passed the probationary period or not. Did a good job – passed. Didn’t – so no.
Hence the conclusion: the expectations of management need to be clarified. Ideally, achieve an offer with specific goals for a trial period. If it didn’t work out, get the leaders and get these measurable goals from them at the very, very beginning of work. So that you have 3 months to achieve them. Well, or time to clearly understand that you are not ready for this, and either adjust your goals or change the company. The sooner this all happens, the better. You won’t get used to it.
Step 3 – Understand who is on your team
Teamlead is a playing coach. Yes, you can do a lot of things yourself with your own hands. But everything won’t work. For this you have a command. And these are your main hands. Mind you, not even extras. For the extras are your own. Such is the pun.
To achieve efficiency from the team, you need to properly distribute tasks and use the right and individual approach to managing each one. So, you need to clearly understand who is in front of you, what he can do and what he can’t. What he wants and is ready to do, and what not.
The first step is to conduct an audit. I wrote in detail about the audit of the team In this article, I will not go into details and repeat. It is important that you clarify the competencies, motivation, psychotype of each employee, as well as the general state of the team, its dynamics, role balance.
After the audit, be sure to take the time to communicate with the team. Talk 1/1 to each. Find out what people have desires, what problems. What is so interesting that you inherited from the past team leader. No one can paint a more complete and truthful picture for you than your employees. In addition, this is the first important step in the formation of the authority of the leader. Show that you care and that you are here to make their work better and more comfortable. The staff will appreciate it.
After such a session of communication, take on the identified problems. Solve the simplest, but the most painful. Everyone is talking about. When employees see that after talking with you there are really positive developments, your credit of trust will increase dramatically. And your authority as a leader will be strengthened.
And the next step is to resolve conflicts. Maybe there are several people applying for the same role (tech lead, for example). Help them decide. Or there are a couple of people who hate each other. Try to return them to the construct or rotate one of them. In general, resolve any conflicts that prevent the team from working effectively. This is again a crucial step in building your credibility and also a good boost to improve the efficiency of the entire team.
Step 4 – Understand your project
The last step, but not the least, is to understand your new project. Why do I put it at the very end? There are 2 reasons.
First, you are a techie. You have dealt with a lot of different projects on duty, which means that it will not be difficult for you to figure out another one for you. You didn’t just become a team leader.
The second is that among IT specialists, the formation of authority on the basis of professionalism is very characteristic. That is, other developers will respect you if you are a cool developer. Testers – if a cool tester. And so on. So. Building your authority as a leader on this is long and tedious. But to strengthen the already emerging authority is easy and effective. Therefore, in my opinion, you need to start with working with a team, with people. Show them that you are a real leader for them. And then fix it with your technical skill. So your leadership in the team will become strong and indestructible. And you will have someone to rely on.
Summary
As a result, we got 4 main steps – what a team leader needs to do when joining a new company:
Understand your role – determine who the team leader is specifically in this company.
Understand the expectations of management – determine who and on the basis of what will make the final decision whether you passed the probationary period or not.
Understand who is on your team – determine who you work with, what opportunities you have next.
Understand your project – determine what you will be working on in the near future.
And each of these points, one way or another, is important not only from the point of view of onboarding and understanding the environment, but also for the formation of your leadership authority in the team and company, which is so necessary if you are a novice leader.
PS
It got pretty tight. Each of these steps can and should be described in more detail. To do this, we invite you on August 21 to public lesson OTUS “TeamLead” course on the topic “Teamlead’s trial period”.
It will analyze in detail how to join a new team and become a partner and leader for them, and not a “boss”, how to dive into the technology stack and quickly understand it, what aspects should be focused on first. Register and come!
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