Grow, Team Leader, big and small
It is a great time when the company where you work began to grow, and the team became so large and clumsy that it lost its flexibility. The old approaches gradually stop working, and you understand that it is time to change something. The first comes a logical decision: let's divide people into teams, set the team leader at Leader (TL) and live happily and happily, as before. So let's figure out where to find a beast like TL. And, of course, we don’t forget that we don’t have time, as the company requires business growth and development.
As I wrote in another article , TLs are not born out of thin air, so there are two ways, each with its own pros and cons. The choice is yours.
Why does a TL team need to scale a business? In a growing company, TL is needed to scale knowledge in the IT department. In today's market, everything is like this:
')
What strategy to take is up to you. I realized that with the growth of the company it is necessary to change something. And success for the 4th type of company. I tried to grow TL, and the main story will be about that.
It would seem that difficult? TL is a cross between a manager and a cool technical specialist. Since we have no managers in our company with the right knowledge, let's make Vasya TL, he's a cool programmer. Congratulations, you have just stepped onto the road to hell.
In my opinion, there are 2 major mistakes that a head or current TL makes. Once I had run into inexperience and I made one of them.
Error number 1. It’s necessary to look for a candidate for this position, not when you think about it, but when you yourself became TL. Why should I immediately look for a replacement? Suppose you have a cool team of specialists, but they have never managed people. This skill must be learned, just as you learn to write code. Timlids are not born, they become. The same thing, to learn to ride a bike, we need to fall several times. There are, of course, exceptions to the rules, a person may already have the makings of it, but let's not rely on chance.
Error number 2. Far from a fact that a good techie will be a good leader. Translating an engineer to the position of manager, you throw him into a new unfamiliar world, take him out of his comfort zone. Not everyone can handle such stress. There are great risks that a person will burn out, may even quit. That is, you can not only be left without TL, but also lose a good programmer.
Let's see how to avoid these errors. TL begin to look for several reasons. First, the risk of an error is great; you should have time to take a good look at the person. Secondly, the player on the bench won't hurt you, for example, in the case of force majeure, when TL is on vacation, on sick leave, or leaving the company altogether.
Since we are all different, it is difficult to predict how a person will develop. Our task is to select candidates who have the makings of leadership and interest in such activities, take them to new responsibilities and teach them. How to make this process as painless and effective as possible? First of all, I learned what smart people write and say, and how it works for them. After that, I began to test and experiment.
Before you start preparing someone for a new position, you need to clearly realize what skills and characteristics TL should possess. You can make a list, there will get about these qualities: responsibility, sociability, ability to learn, motivation, a sufficient level of technical skills, emotional intelligence.
Now it's small: you need to find people who meet these requirements, and develop the necessary skills in them.
How to find them? Real skills are best manifested in practice. Create a candidate such situations in which he can reveal these skills. For example:
Also, when looking at potential TLs, it is helpful to pay attention to the following points:
Also, do not forget about the process of study itself: you must help a person, suggest something, discuss. But do not give ready-made answers, be a mentor for him. Ask how he will act in a certain situation? How will solve some problem?
Approach people and ask: “The sales department has such a problem, how do you think, how can you help them solve it?” Discuss his ideas with this person, he will tell you what you don’t see, and maybe throw new ideas . This will teach him to think and reason, and not just to perform tasks on the machine.
Remember that HR in your company most likely will not be engaged in the development of people, this is what TL should do. You see guys every day, you understand strong and weak qualities, try different situations, all this responsibility lies with you. Do not expect HR to come to you, look at your employee and give you a ready answer. You need a person to whom you can transfer responsibilities, and the development process will go without failures in the normal mode and do not require your attention. This will free up time, and it can be spent with benefit: on planning, building business processes, studying something, etc.
This is a gradual process; you test skill by skill. But here it is important to be able to stop in time. If the training does not go, and the person has to force himself, then do not continue. It is better to keep a talented engineer in the team.
We are all human and, unfortunately, we can not always objectively evaluate people. You need to abstract from personal relationships and consider only professional qualities.
Monitoring will help in this situation - constant monitoring of the necessary metrics, and this is a continuous process. I just made myself a table in Google Docs , wrote in there employees, competencies, tasks that I gave, and recorded the results. Here the key point is that it needs to be done all the time, not to stop, otherwise we will not see a clear picture. Over time, a sufficient body of data will be accumulated that will make it easy to track a person’s development. For example, at the moment there may be 2 people with the same indicators. But if you look at such a metric as “dynamics of development”, then you can see that initially one had much less experience and knowledge, that is, it develops faster. Without constant removal of metrics it is difficult to see. Over time, you will develop an objective picture: it will be seen who worked on himself, that is, such employees will not be lost against the background of others.
Also, the analysis of the data obtained allows us to see what else a person needs to work on in order to eventually increase his effectiveness as a combat unit. In due course at you more accurate strategy of development will be built. In addition, the accumulated data will be useful for making quick personnel decisions. When the time of X comes, you will simply have to look at the table, and not convulsively remember who and what can.
Experiment and develop your approaches. This will help articles, books, conferences and other sources of knowledge. Of course, there is the option of hiring an expensive coach who can help you quickly figure it out. But I believe that it is impossible to take and immediately change everything in a team that has evolved over the years. And it’s hard to believe that a specialist will be able to “guess” and immediately select precisely those individual metrics that are important in a particular team. There is a great chance that everyone would nod, they understood, and then the coach left, and the team would remain, no one would continue to develop. The variant with a coach is good when he constantly or for a long time works with the team. Or you have a special employee who is engaged in building processes. A coach can give him the right direction, and the employee himself will further develop everything.
There are no ready recipes. Let your approaches be clumsy at first, but over time you will come to optimal metrics. The main thing is that you will see the whole picture in dynamics, and this is extremely important. Growth rates over a long period of time can tell a lot.
Help specialists to reach a new level. Make people analyze at retrospectives, then they will understand what has been done well and what needs to be worked on. But in no case in the form of raids. Involve them in discussions, you must be trusted and understand that you are open and ready to help. And this too must be done constantly, otherwise all efforts will be lost.
During the selection in advance, try to find out whether people like this job, whether they have a desire to develop in this direction. Everything is simple: either a person is indifferent, or his eyes are burning. It is also extremely important to know the opinion of the other team members.
The hour of X comes, it is time to appoint a new team leader. You look at the candidates and their achievements and make an informed decision. Sometimes it is difficult to choose, and sometimes you already know exactly who will be TL. In my practice, usually the majority were eliminated in the selection process, and more often did not even have to choose.
Of course, it’s good when the team is ready and agrees with the new leader, but there may be a situation where you choose one of two strong candidates and refuse the other. Be sure to explain to the second why he was not chosen, what skills to pull up. Say that you appreciated it and are ready to try again in the future for the role of TL. Of course, not everything can go smoothly, but there is no universal answer.
So you have a new TL and his team. At this work on its formation does not end there. You are still engaged in mentoring and helping him. It is important to continue to transfer his knowledge and skills to him, but in no case should he decide for him. Maximum - analysis of situations with analysis, but decisions should remain with him.
The process is running, and everything goes on as usual. Can you finally relax and concentrate on your business? No, you must continue to keep your finger on the pulse and monitor the situation. Do not take it carelessly, they say, the very mood. TL errors are much more expensive for the company than the mistakes of ordinary developers. In addition, if the process is disrupted, then problems may start with the team. Therefore, it is better to do it right away than to break everything and start all over again.
Continue to discuss with the new TL some decisions, over and over again, make sure that he correctly understands the principles of planning and prioritizing tasks, understands tasks from a business point of view and seeks them to ensure that they do not work specifically for business. He should ask questions about deadlines and plan risks, and also realize that he, too, needs to look for a replacement for TL. Explain about burnout: if he works hard for a month, doing his best, then sooner or later he will come back. It will be sad if you miss this moment and lose a specialist. Only after the person has mastered, it will be possible to slowly let him go free floating.
I have never done this, but based on logic, I can say that in fact you have all the same indicators, only you need to get the result much earlier - during the trial period. Only the difficulty lies in the fact that a person still has to join the new team, his motivations and values ​​must be on the same plane with the company. Which option is better? I have no answer to this question. One can only compare reality and expectations.
There is no ready-made solution for growing TL, it is the same creative process as writing code. TL is the first step in management, people need to be prepared for this, and the better you do it, the easier it will be later. Start looking for a replacement right away. Conduct training, giving different tasks, and be sure to remove feedback. This process is continuous, you need to constantly work, otherwise it will wither like a flower without watering. Help new TL and share your knowledge. Even if the company is very small and only at the beginning of its development, adjust the process, this will contribute to the future. And do not close everything on yourself, this is the road to hell.
My other IT management articles:
→ What is to be a Team Leader
→ Dream team from nothing: hiring specialists in IT
→ How to create successful teams and manage them
→ New employee - dead or alive
As I wrote in another article , TLs are not born out of thin air, so there are two ways, each with its own pros and cons. The choice is yours.
- Hiring from:
Pros: ready combat unit, no need to spend resources (time and money) on training.
Cons: the cat in the bag - there is a chance to make a mistake, it may not share the values ​​of the team, the time to get the team trust - Growing on your own:
Pros: the chance of a mistake of choice is minimized, a big team trust.
Cons: a waste of resources (time and money) for training.
Why does a TL team need to scale a business? In a growing company, TL is needed to scale knowledge in the IT department. In today's market, everything is like this:
')
- Small companies that have a leader (often a founder). Due to it, everything is spinning.
- Companies that do not consider this important, and they have everything going on as usual.
- Companies that are trying to solve the problem of TL. They have a poor experience in hiring and growing. There they are trying to adjust their processes so as to live without TL.
- Large companies, in which they successfully work to ensure that they have TL. They try to scale and adjust the whole process.
What strategy to take is up to you. I realized that with the growth of the company it is necessary to change something. And success for the 4th type of company. I tried to grow TL, and the main story will be about that.
As usually prescribed TL
It would seem that difficult? TL is a cross between a manager and a cool technical specialist. Since we have no managers in our company with the right knowledge, let's make Vasya TL, he's a cool programmer. Congratulations, you have just stepped onto the road to hell.
In my opinion, there are 2 major mistakes that a head or current TL makes. Once I had run into inexperience and I made one of them.
Error number 1. It’s necessary to look for a candidate for this position, not when you think about it, but when you yourself became TL. Why should I immediately look for a replacement? Suppose you have a cool team of specialists, but they have never managed people. This skill must be learned, just as you learn to write code. Timlids are not born, they become. The same thing, to learn to ride a bike, we need to fall several times. There are, of course, exceptions to the rules, a person may already have the makings of it, but let's not rely on chance.
Error number 2. Far from a fact that a good techie will be a good leader. Translating an engineer to the position of manager, you throw him into a new unfamiliar world, take him out of his comfort zone. Not everyone can handle such stress. There are great risks that a person will burn out, may even quit. That is, you can not only be left without TL, but also lose a good programmer.
When and how to search?
Let's see how to avoid these errors. TL begin to look for several reasons. First, the risk of an error is great; you should have time to take a good look at the person. Secondly, the player on the bench won't hurt you, for example, in the case of force majeure, when TL is on vacation, on sick leave, or leaving the company altogether.
Since we are all different, it is difficult to predict how a person will develop. Our task is to select candidates who have the makings of leadership and interest in such activities, take them to new responsibilities and teach them. How to make this process as painless and effective as possible? First of all, I learned what smart people write and say, and how it works for them. After that, I began to test and experiment.
Before you start preparing someone for a new position, you need to clearly realize what skills and characteristics TL should possess. You can make a list, there will get about these qualities: responsibility, sociability, ability to learn, motivation, a sufficient level of technical skills, emotional intelligence.
How to choose TL?
Now it's small: you need to find people who meet these requirements, and develop the necessary skills in them.
How to find them? Real skills are best manifested in practice. Create a candidate such situations in which he can reveal these skills. For example:
- Give the task without part of the input data, explain what you need to figure out yourself, and watch. See what approaches he will use, whether he will try to solve the problem himself.
- Leave it for some time to perform the duties of TL and ask to distribute tasks. In one of the companies I had a period when I was completely immersed in negotiations with partners. The guys from the team did a lot of things for me. Solving my tasks and being in the office, I had the opportunity to observe the team and their work from the inside, without interfering. I shot the metrics, looked at how they handle or not.
- Let's do the tasks and see how he solves them. Only within the framework of the conditions or something he thinks out and takes the initiative? In this situation, you can judge the independence.
- Give the task, within the framework of which it is necessary to interact with other departments and specialists. If he could, then he has no problems with communication skills.
Also, when looking at potential TLs, it is helpful to pay attention to the following points:
- See how the candidate approaches the problem. It can be done in different ways: in 2 weeks or 2 days. What is the solution of the problem? On the business or on the process itself? Is his motivation right? Do his aspirations coincide with the party line? He must understand that there must be some balance between business and development.
- Does he manage to be an informal leader? Do colleagues value his authority or not? Can he influence the team without giving direct instructions? Leadership is the skill that allows you to attract people and turn them into a team, to be able to rally them.
- Is the candidate comfortable in the new role? Constantly withdraw feedback: ask directly whether it was difficult for him to complete a task.
- Can he demand deadlines for tasks and plans? The fact is that there are soft people; it’s difficult and unusual for them to demand something from their colleagues. And it happens the other way around when a person goes too far and is too tough with a team.
Also, do not forget about the process of study itself: you must help a person, suggest something, discuss. But do not give ready-made answers, be a mentor for him. Ask how he will act in a certain situation? How will solve some problem?
Approach people and ask: “The sales department has such a problem, how do you think, how can you help them solve it?” Discuss his ideas with this person, he will tell you what you don’t see, and maybe throw new ideas . This will teach him to think and reason, and not just to perform tasks on the machine.
Remember that HR in your company most likely will not be engaged in the development of people, this is what TL should do. You see guys every day, you understand strong and weak qualities, try different situations, all this responsibility lies with you. Do not expect HR to come to you, look at your employee and give you a ready answer. You need a person to whom you can transfer responsibilities, and the development process will go without failures in the normal mode and do not require your attention. This will free up time, and it can be spent with benefit: on planning, building business processes, studying something, etc.
This is a gradual process; you test skill by skill. But here it is important to be able to stop in time. If the training does not go, and the person has to force himself, then do not continue. It is better to keep a talented engineer in the team.
How to shoot metrics
We are all human and, unfortunately, we can not always objectively evaluate people. You need to abstract from personal relationships and consider only professional qualities.
Monitoring will help in this situation - constant monitoring of the necessary metrics, and this is a continuous process. I just made myself a table in Google Docs , wrote in there employees, competencies, tasks that I gave, and recorded the results. Here the key point is that it needs to be done all the time, not to stop, otherwise we will not see a clear picture. Over time, a sufficient body of data will be accumulated that will make it easy to track a person’s development. For example, at the moment there may be 2 people with the same indicators. But if you look at such a metric as “dynamics of development”, then you can see that initially one had much less experience and knowledge, that is, it develops faster. Without constant removal of metrics it is difficult to see. Over time, you will develop an objective picture: it will be seen who worked on himself, that is, such employees will not be lost against the background of others.
Also, the analysis of the data obtained allows us to see what else a person needs to work on in order to eventually increase his effectiveness as a combat unit. In due course at you more accurate strategy of development will be built. In addition, the accumulated data will be useful for making quick personnel decisions. When the time of X comes, you will simply have to look at the table, and not convulsively remember who and what can.
Experiment and develop your approaches. This will help articles, books, conferences and other sources of knowledge. Of course, there is the option of hiring an expensive coach who can help you quickly figure it out. But I believe that it is impossible to take and immediately change everything in a team that has evolved over the years. And it’s hard to believe that a specialist will be able to “guess” and immediately select precisely those individual metrics that are important in a particular team. There is a great chance that everyone would nod, they understood, and then the coach left, and the team would remain, no one would continue to develop. The variant with a coach is good when he constantly or for a long time works with the team. Or you have a special employee who is engaged in building processes. A coach can give him the right direction, and the employee himself will further develop everything.
There are no ready recipes. Let your approaches be clumsy at first, but over time you will come to optimal metrics. The main thing is that you will see the whole picture in dynamics, and this is extremely important. Growth rates over a long period of time can tell a lot.
Help specialists to reach a new level. Make people analyze at retrospectives, then they will understand what has been done well and what needs to be worked on. But in no case in the form of raids. Involve them in discussions, you must be trusted and understand that you are open and ready to help. And this too must be done constantly, otherwise all efforts will be lost.
During the selection in advance, try to find out whether people like this job, whether they have a desire to develop in this direction. Everything is simple: either a person is indifferent, or his eyes are burning. It is also extremely important to know the opinion of the other team members.
TL assigned. What's next?
The hour of X comes, it is time to appoint a new team leader. You look at the candidates and their achievements and make an informed decision. Sometimes it is difficult to choose, and sometimes you already know exactly who will be TL. In my practice, usually the majority were eliminated in the selection process, and more often did not even have to choose.
Of course, it’s good when the team is ready and agrees with the new leader, but there may be a situation where you choose one of two strong candidates and refuse the other. Be sure to explain to the second why he was not chosen, what skills to pull up. Say that you appreciated it and are ready to try again in the future for the role of TL. Of course, not everything can go smoothly, but there is no universal answer.
So you have a new TL and his team. At this work on its formation does not end there. You are still engaged in mentoring and helping him. It is important to continue to transfer his knowledge and skills to him, but in no case should he decide for him. Maximum - analysis of situations with analysis, but decisions should remain with him.
The process is running, and everything goes on as usual. Can you finally relax and concentrate on your business? No, you must continue to keep your finger on the pulse and monitor the situation. Do not take it carelessly, they say, the very mood. TL errors are much more expensive for the company than the mistakes of ordinary developers. In addition, if the process is disrupted, then problems may start with the team. Therefore, it is better to do it right away than to break everything and start all over again.
Continue to discuss with the new TL some decisions, over and over again, make sure that he correctly understands the principles of planning and prioritizing tasks, understands tasks from a business point of view and seeks them to ensure that they do not work specifically for business. He should ask questions about deadlines and plan risks, and also realize that he, too, needs to look for a replacement for TL. Explain about burnout: if he works hard for a month, doing his best, then sooner or later he will come back. It will be sad if you miss this moment and lose a specialist. Only after the person has mastered, it will be possible to slowly let him go free floating.
And what if you take the finished?
I have never done this, but based on logic, I can say that in fact you have all the same indicators, only you need to get the result much earlier - during the trial period. Only the difficulty lies in the fact that a person still has to join the new team, his motivations and values ​​must be on the same plane with the company. Which option is better? I have no answer to this question. One can only compare reality and expectations.
findings
There is no ready-made solution for growing TL, it is the same creative process as writing code. TL is the first step in management, people need to be prepared for this, and the better you do it, the easier it will be later. Start looking for a replacement right away. Conduct training, giving different tasks, and be sure to remove feedback. This process is continuous, you need to constantly work, otherwise it will wither like a flower without watering. Help new TL and share your knowledge. Even if the company is very small and only at the beginning of its development, adjust the process, this will contribute to the future. And do not close everything on yourself, this is the road to hell.
My other IT management articles:
→ What is to be a Team Leader
→ Dream team from nothing: hiring specialists in IT
→ How to create successful teams and manage them
→ New employee - dead or alive
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/457430/
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