The role of team leader: what is left for managers?

Hi, Habr!

Recently, in the field of IT and digital, the word "timlid" is increasingly heard. But upon closer examination, it is clear that everyone understands this profession in their own way.
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Someone says that the team should lead the entire project, and managers only interfere. Others believe that only the manager should communicate with the client. The administrative question also remains open: in whose subordination are developers and testers working?

In this article we will try to figure out who this mysterious "Timlid" is and whether managers are needed?



Who is a team leader?

TeamLead, as follows from the word itself, is the leader of the development team. This is the person who is responsible for everything related to the development in the project. It has a very rich functionality - it is the removal of the client’s request, the assessment of the scope and timing of work taking into account the risks and peculiarities of his team, the distribution of tasks within the team with maximum efficiency, planning and release of releases, and even the team’s motivation to work and participation in key release presentations .

The importance of such a person in a team is difficult to overestimate, because the manager is usually not a technical specialist, so he may have difficulties both at the stage of task assessment and at the stage of organizing the development and presentation of releases.

Does team lid write code? Of course, because he inspires his team, including personal example. But he spends no more than 20-30% of his working time on writing code, since his team management is his priority.

Professional portrait

Competences necessary for a person applying for such a position in a project can be divided into two groups: technical and managerial. Consider them separately.

Technical Competences
Timlid should, first of all, be able to transform a business task into a technical task, understandable to developers. This is not as simple as it seems, because business problems are sometimes formulated very, very lengthy. Moreover, he needs to be able to explain to developers not only what needs to be done, but why it is needed.

The leader of the development team must certainly have an understanding of the industrial development process in terms of the division of responsibility in the team, the process of managing the requirements, quality and technologies necessary to service the process.

As mentioned above, the tmlide code itself writes, therefore, no doubt, it must have solid development experience - from 5 years and more.

Management competencies
This group includes almost all standard managerial competencies, but it is worth highlighting the most important ones. For example, delegation. Many timlids sin by writing all the code themselves. Thus, on the one hand, they prevent people from making mistakes, learning from their mistakes and developing. On the other hand, fail their managerial tasks.

The next important competence is team motivation. Those professionals who learn to do it correctly will get a huge advantage over the others. A person working with his team side by side is much easier to motivate people than a formal boss.

Finally, a team leader is a mentor for members of his team. Therefore, he needs to be able to develop people correctly - to distribute interesting and complex tasks, correctly
give developmental feedback, make development plans.

Of course, this is not a complete list of skills needed timlidu. Do not forget about universal personal qualities, which are just as important as professional competencies. About them should be said separately.

Let's start with responsibility. The ability to take responsibility for their actions and results, unfortunately, is not so common today. The reasons for this are not completely clear. Most likely, the roots of this problem go deep into the educational system, which rather forms the ability to shift responsibility to circumstances and other people.

The ability to competently express thoughts in writing and orally. Timlid, of course, should not be a professional speaker and writer, but it is simply vital to have elementary writing skills and oral presentation of his thoughts. Imagine a team leader who writes spelling and grammatical errors and is unable to communicate with the customer to connect two words.

And, finally, the most important quality for any profession is honesty. The ability to be honest in the first place in front of himself, the ability not to close his eyes to the moments when something goes wrong. Honesty to team members, project managers and customers. Just think how many unsuccessful projects would be saved if someone got up on time and said: "We have a problem."

Manager's role

Even if the team has a very strong team leader, the manager will still have a number of tasks. This and administrative work on the maintenance of contracts and other documents, and budget planning and timing. In the absence of an account director, the manager assumes his duties and is engaged in maintaining and developing relations with the client.

Finally, the manager can be a real producer of the project, managing the product from several sides at once: design, development, marketing, etc. However, this is a very difficult role, and the manager needs to grow to it in a professional and personal sense.

Summary

The more complex the project, the more important the role of team leader in it, because the manager simply cannot have all the competencies - especially technical - to the same extent as the professional developer. While, even a very strong programming professional may not have good managerial skills to manage development. That is why the team leader becomes an indispensable link in the team of any project.

The question remains, how do developers become timlid? We will discuss this and our IT careers in general in our next articles.