What can be not ready, becoming a team lead

One technical specialist of our company PayOnline , which is engaged in the automation of payment acceptance, proposed to translate the article by the author Pascal de Vink, who worked as a team lead for 2 years. When Pascal only took up this position, it turned out that he was simply not ready for many things. This article will help to avoid many mistakes on the way from the developer to the team leader. Below is a direct translation.



Before that, I was an engineer and worked directly on the code. They told me that I had good leadership skills, which is probably why I asked for a promotion. I did not even think what it means to manage a whole team of engineers. Now I think that I would have had more time to prepare. So, without further ado, here are the things for which I was not ready.

Less development

This may be obvious, but the role of the lead developer means that you need to look more at the big picture, rather than go into specific aspects of what is happening. I did not understand this until I worked for a couple of months, during which I suffered from the fact that I wanted to understand all the tasks, but there was no time for that. I had less time to dig into the code, and people continued to contact me with their very highly specialized tasks. Too late, I realized that I need to understand the team, not all of its knowledge. Find out who understands the right area turned out to be much faster and more valuable. Although, digging through the code was much more fun.

Delegate tasks

There was little time, so I had to delegate a lot more than I originally wanted. Asking someone to do things they don’t want to do is hard enough. It is even harder to order, because in order to properly approach a person, you need to sympathize with him at a certain level. Also, due to the fact that I liked to do my previous work so much, it was not easy for me to let someone else take over. I wanted to control what was being done and how. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that at the same time it was impossible to control everything and fit into the sprints. So I just had to let go.

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Distribute finances and budget

The financial side of things usually doesn’t interest me. However, since I was now responsible for the team and for moving it in the right direction, money suddenly became important. I was responsible for how much we spend and what value we create for the company. My experience in finance was limited to the home budget, and I preferred not to study them especially and was glad if someone made it up for me. This time this number did not pass. I was responsible for the licenses that we used, payments to contractors, travel expenses, holiday pay, allowances and salaries for new employees. Especially strained licenses (Zend server and Oracle) and contractors. Every month it was necessary to check that all hours paid by check were spent, and licenses were relevant. I was able to automate much through Excel and Jira, but still every month I spent the whole day on it.

Recruit and fire

Seamlessly move on to another interesting thing - the reception (and dismissal) of employees. I was lucky that I personally did not have to fire anyone. There was a time when the company’s business got a little stupid, and we had to part with several people, but managers were involved in everything. I also had to hire people, which, given the current state of the market, is very difficult. Especially when you work not in a fashionable startup, not on fashionable products and not at all in a fashionable area. I spent a lot of time on “idle” interviews: you communicate with the candidate, you make an offer (by the way, quite good), and the candidate goes to work for another company. It is clear that the market works this way, and I certainly don’t blame the candidates for looking for the job of their dreams. But I lost a lot of time getting a little in return. In general, I think that just was not focused enough! I devoted too much time to the interview process and too little to actually bring the right people to the company. Because of this, recruitment was disappointing, tedious and, ultimately, not satisfying. Later, I saw that if I focused on bringing new people and holding shorter interviews with them, there would be much more benefit.

Create culture

The leader of the group creates the culture of their group. It is often said that culture is what you allow and what you do not allow to happen. In this regard, I was completely unprepared. Although the role of a leader was familiar to me, and I was not afraid to speak out loud, if I thought that something was being done incorrectly, I still got used to express myself as an equal among equals, or at least enlisting the support of other leaders. In the new position I did not have a “support group” - the other leads were busy creating a culture in their own teams. And I was no longer equal among equals in the team - because I was its leader. The team expected leadership from me, including the fact that I determined what is allowed and what is not. Of course, this is easy to do when it comes to an inappropriate remark or an obvious jamb of the type of being late. It becomes difficult when an employee is late for a good reason, for example, because of the illness of his wife or child. Every time an employee made an exceptional request (for example, to let him go home), he had to make a choice - to allow or not. Moreover, I had to evaluate what effect my choice would have on the whole team, and what then to do with this effect. Sometimes it was easy: to be open and honest with the team, it is easier for her to understand and make decisions of the team lead. But it has also been difficult - when deadlines are on the nose, and employees do not get along. It is difficult to create a culture of positive, honesty and transparency in an atmosphere of stress and negative emotions.

Motivate

Stress, deadlines, negative emotions, failures and other negatives are part of life. In general, I am one of those who have a glass half full, but when I had to deal with the feelings of the whole team, it was difficult for me to keep the mood and at the same time motivate my colleagues. When the debriefing almost turned into a full-fledged srach, it became clear to me that simply being good and positive was no longer enough. It was necessary to draw strength from other positive sources in my life, otherwise I just could not cope with the negative. And it turned out to be the hardest thing: to do something that does not give pleasure, while understanding that you are not doing it very well, and sacrifice for the sake of this positive events in your own life. Fortunately, things were not always bad at all. However, I was absolutely not ready to motivate so much.

Mentoring

As a good leader, I consider it my duty not only to keep the team in shape, but also to help it grow. Another thing I was not ready for was mentoring. I think I have a natural inclination to listen to people and help them grow, so that I generally managed to improvise on the go, but I would still like to have more experience. I always thought that mentoring works from top to bottom: managers teach each other, and then their teams. In reality, this is not necessarily the case. I think if I had the experience of mentoring other people in the early stages of my career, I would be more prepared for the team lead position. In this respect, projects like PHP Mentoring can be very useful.

Collect feedback

Along with mentoring, I underestimated the importance of self-assessing my work and getting feedback from my colleagues. I have been familiar with both technicians for a long time, but I did not immediately realize that the role of team lead requires (especially at first) so much that it is not enough to collect feedback and assess your own actions once a year. The exchange of feedbacks more often than once a year was not at all part of the corporate culture, and this is not enough for the processing of feedback to become a habit and become a useful tool. Looking back, I understand that I had to collect feedback much earlier - before I even moved to the position of lead developer.

To plan

Depending on the role, it is often the team leader who is the first to ask “when will it be ready?” And “is there enough time for X?”. In the past, I helped a lot to answer such questions, but I never had to answer them directly to top management. I did not have to “plan resources” (I can’t tolerate this expression; people are not “resources”), so I was uncomfortable about assessing whether the team could take on another project. Later, I learned that it’s worth more to trust the planning team and assess whether it has enough time. I also learned that behind the initial task there is often another hidden task. If you get to the bottom of it, get extra time on resource planning.

To communicate with people

Although the position is called the “lead developer,” most of the work is communication with people. I am able and not shy to communicate with people, but I understood the importance of this skill too late. At first, I was too focused on the development and experiences about the lack of time for it. I realized that the ability to sit down and discuss the task with a colleague, no matter how simple or insignificant it may seem, gives a lot more than looking at the development on its own.

Lead by example

Position implies more power and responsibility and makes you wonder - which one of me is the leader. I like the concept of the leader "of the people" and do not like the concept of the leader on the golden throne. I also like to think that a “leader” is not a “boss”, but rather a “helper” - one who creates new opportunities and helps people grow. However, it is sometimes much more enticing to just scatter tasks, set deadlines and go about your own business. If you want to become an inspiring leader, you will have to devote a lot of work and attention to this. Often it seemed to me that I could do more for the growth of the team, create more new opportunities for obtaining new knowledge. Usually this was due to the fact that I was distracted by deadlines and stress.

Solve personal problems

Just a couple of days after taking up a new position, they began to address me with illnesses, personal problems, vacations, plugging at work, etc. Many problems were easily solved with the help of common sense, but some stories really sink into the soul. I was not ready for such stories. I made other people's problems my own, and instead of keeping the necessary distance, I allowed sympathy to prevail. I began to subconsciously think about these problems, they even dreamed of me - I am such a person. It got to the point that I had a slight sleep disorder - here I had to actively create a distance. And even though it seemed to me that I was really helping people with their problems, I still did not become the hero they needed. The maximum that I could - to listen and, maybe, to make teamwork a little easier. The realization of this fact was not easy for me.

Evaluate KPI, goals and objectives

Besides the fact that the team must be taught and directed, it must be customized. For this, our company uses the technique of tasks and key indicators ( KPI ). The technique showed itself well, but it quickly became difficult to combine corporate goals and personal goals of employees. When employees really want to try DDD , and the company is not at all sure that the product will not be frozen, it becomes very difficult to achieve the goal.

As a developer, I often did not see (or did not want to see, or were not allowed to see) the global goals of the company.



Now I see what work my manager had to combine them with my personal goals. In order for everything to work, you need to actively lobby your project and adjust the goals on the go, if it turns out that they cannot be achieved.

Public speaking

I didn’t realize at all that the leader often communicates not only with his own team, but also with other teams, and sometimes with the whole company. Presenting plans for the quarter, telling about the progress of the team, explaining technical things in non-technical language is part of the work. Fortunately, I already had experience of public speaking at conferences. Conferences help prepare for public speaking, but they do not prepare for the pressure that comes over you when you need to get the message across to get the go-ahead to the project. I quickly realized that deciding not beautiful slides, but submitting a message, and only one attempt.



We told about the pitfalls for which Pascal was not ready, and we hope that you will learn a lesson from these mistakes, get ready and do not step on the same rake. If you need to organize the reception of payments on the site, please contact . Subscribe to our corporate blog , there is still a lot of interesting things ahead.