“Why was I so angry, they just didn’t teach me” (c) team lead

Now we all live in the concept of continuous learning, because the speed of change is only growing, and we must correspond to the existing reality. Today I decided to delve deeper into the topic of what team leaders of large IT companies and others are taught.

By the will of fate, I am a methodologist and head of the training department of a large IT company and a teacher at HSE Digital and Innopolis, and from here I communicate a lot and are warm friends with recruiting and HR heads. Again, all together we constantly harp on our favorite topics of the shortage of specialists, what will happen to the market, who and what to teach, and how to generally continue to live in this complex world. Due to my “duty of duty,” I have to constantly be in the context of this issue – not only for team leads, but also for products, architects, UX researchers, and in fact for almost all IT specialists.

Team trends

In general, education is not an isolated system; it changes in accordance with general trends. I will give you the most relevant ones.

1. Demographic hole

This is perhaps the most central trend that affects everything, and not only in IT. Judging by what we see, we still have a shortage of specialists for many years to come; the timing depends on the development of robotics and the popularization of the use of AI. In my opinion, in our field there is increased optimism on this topic, because, based on experience, everything does not change as quickly as we want, and especially people.

2. Growing demand for IT specialists outside of traditional IT companies

Nowadays, any large company, be it retail or manufacturing, creates and develops its division in the IT direction.

3. As a result, wage growth

Several times at conferences and in discussions with HR, I heard forecasts about when this growth will end, but so far no one has guessed, although the forecasts of some are far beyond the horizon, so we are waiting.

In this regard, there was a need to build up certain team leadership skills. I will not now list the entire management planning cycle point by point (convenience for the team, trackers, transparency, flexibility, ability to set tasks, etc., etc.). This is the basis, it has always been in the training of management personnel reserve and team leads. Today we are talking only about what has been added due to the demands of the time.

The load on team leads is growing – fact. If previously you could “throw” a vacancy at a recruiter and wait for him to bring you someone more or less suitable, now they are forced to dive much deeper into this process. And starting with the job description, where it is no longer enough to simply send a description of the task stack, you need to look for additional attraction tools, advantages of the project, product, team…

In fact, now a job presentation has turned into a sale in a highly competitive market, and, of course, a recruiter simply cannot do this. Let's be honest, he will either make a copy-paste of a previous vacancy from the archive, or a similar one, but the more knowledgeable will turn to GPT. But this still will not reflect the specifics of your vacancy.

Now every team leader learns how to conduct an interview professionally, because a hiring mistake will be very expensive. The main points, perhaps, are the following:

• real professional experience

• candidate profile,

• his motivation

• how suitable it is.

Well, and the skills to attract a candidate: yes, because now it’s not us who are chosen, but us, this happened before, but not so harshly. And then this candidate needs to be adapted, because the principle “if you’re interested, he’ll figure it out on his own” no longer works.

Onboarding alone, even if you have a great adaptation course with a well-structured educational design, is not enough: you have to customize it for each new employee, taking into account his characteristics and motivation. And this also falls on the team lead. Therefore skills STAR interviewidentifying true motivation is a mandatory competency.

What does this lead to?

When an employee is already on your team, you have to constantly monitor his condition: is he burnt out, is he still interested in the stack, how is his relationship with the team, is he already looking at the market. Almost more attention to key specialists than to windy beauties. Face-2-face conversation, consisting mainly of questions “how are things going on the project?” and “how are you?” and socially expected answers do not solve existing problems.

Everyone interested is pumping up the identification of balance want-can-need:

• I want – what I like and gets into motivation,

• I can – about skills and requests for help and training,

• must – something that you have to do, but you don’t want and don’t like.

This is the skill of asking the right questions, there are many of them. For example,

1. What tasks would you like to repeat?

2. What tasks would you like to delegate?

3. What were the most difficult tasks this week? etc.

After all, if the “I want” block collapses, the team lead does not actually manage motivation, and the employee either goes to burnout or joins competitors. And giving developmental feedback so that you really want to develop is a poem.

Employee retention

Another topic that emerged was retention. What to do if during F2F you realized that there is a risk of losing such a beloved specialist, or they have already come to you with an offer from another company? What is the algorithm of actions? But he exists! Without going into details:

• at least understand whether we are working with a problem that has arisen now or with one that was missed earlier and its consequences, in the second case it will be more difficult and there are fewer chances,

• has the final internal decision already been made or is the person still in the process, as they say, standing at a crossroads and thinking (this can be determined by the linguistics of speech, introductory words, sighs),

• do we manage his motivation, do we have something that interests him (in the task stack, in the future),

• whether there was a loss of trust (they promised – they didn’t fulfill it, and other situations that could lead to this), in this case the chances of retention are almost zero.

And there are a lot of other questions: is it worth keeping him at all and how to calculate it, how to conduct a conversation correctly in order to keep him, and if you keep him with money, what to do so that he doesn’t come in three months with a new offer and secure this scenario, and then the whole team? In general, the topic of retention is large and serious, and we teach this too.

The team lead’s burden is not easy in today’s market.

Self-regulation skills

But what about the lead himself, when the demands on him are growing, and the tasks are only becoming more numerous, how not to burn out, how to maintain productivity, and also desirable optimism and joy of life? This is another area that is gaining momentum in training.

It has always been difficult for managers, or rather their brains, to authorize their results. Why do studies say that the happiest professions are cook, hairdresser, etc.? These are all people who work with their hands and see the results of their work. For team leads, everything is different; you still need to convince your brain that the result obtained by the team and its specific specialists is your result, and that it needs to give you dopamine and all sorts of other goodies for this.

By the way, they won’t forget to tell you for sure that the mistakes and failures of your team are your result. It’s no secret that the higher your position, the less someone is involved in your motivation and adaptation: do everything yourself. Well, constant changes, understaffed teams, overload – this is also a reality for many. Therefore, everything related to mental health, self-regulation skills, managing one’s resource, as well as working with the resource and state of the team, the neurophysiological basis for survival under heavy loads is also gaining momentum.

In conclusion

To summarize, I can highlight 5 topics that have appeared in the training of team leaders in many companies: recruiting, adaptation, retention, effective F2F and everything related to mental health and burnout prevention. I hope this material will be useful to someone, and he will be able to apply it in his work, or even in his personal life.

Colleagues, what do they teach at your company? Share, I’ll be happy to use it!