Transitioning from a developer to a team leader is a game changer, your main responsibility isn’t solely writing code anymore but to effectively lead the assigned team and achieve the agreed results with the team. But what does that mean? What should you actually do in your new role?

Traits of a good team leader

• takes full responsibility for the team’s output,
• delivers high quality results on a project with the team,
• continuously increases the team’s competencies,
• motivates the team.

Taking responsibility

Firstly you have to accept full ownership for your team’s output. As it’s being said, with great power comes a great responsibility. From now on it’s your responsibility to deliver a project on time and within agreed budget. You will also be held accountable if anything goes wrong on a project even if the wrongdoing has been done by one of your team mate, but he/she can’t be blamed as the you are the team leader. Sounds scary? It does not have to be that way, in the following paragraphs we’ll analyse how to set an effective process of successfully leading the team and how to mitigate any risks.

Delivers high quality results

In your role you’re also expected to lead the team in order to deliver certain results like the outlined above such as meet the project deadline, keep it within budget and in certain quality. This implies you’ll be efficiently utilising your team’s competencies, in other words delegating work to them. For freshly appointed team leaders it might be really challenging to do that, to entrust a task that you know you’re good at to someone else because of the fear that the team mates won’t complete the task in a quality you’d do. Especially in the case of junior members of the team. Don’t worry, we’ll dive into delegating in a moment.

Increasing team’s competencies

As the captain of your team you now also serve as a mentor to the team who has to make sure your team flourishes and grows professionally. It means to thoroughly track your team members progress in terms of their competencies and knowledge of the professional field and come up with a strategy how to update your team’s knowledge so it reflects the current market needs. This is achieved by arranging various internal workshops, lectures and super important 101s. More on that later.

Team motivation

As motivation is a subjective matter for different kinds of people with no “one fits all“ solution, it’s important to know your team well and know exactly what motivates them. One of the most powerful tool to motivate people is to assign them a responsibility, a small or larger area they will have ownership for. By doing that you’re communicating trust and making them grow. You are handing them something they can call “their own”.

How to set up a team leading process

• have a competency model (combination of theoretical and practical skills, a single competency model for each role)
• determine seniority levels of each team member to be able to assign adequate tasks tech-stack wise
• prepare a high quality task description
• choose a fitting management style - tell / delegate (don’t let yourself do the work for others)
• give individuals their own responsibilities, delegate as soon as possible, even if you don’t think the person is not fully competent yet
• track your team progress and make sure team members keep up with needed competencies
• share critical feedback with particular team members immediately, less important feedback could wait for one-on-one meetings
• catch development / process inefficiencies, address them and come up with a solution
• make standards how to write code across the company and remove unnecessary duplications between teams by making sure these standards are followed
• arrange one-on-one meetings on regular basis (e.g. once in 3 months)

Oftentimes the most challenging part of becoming the team leader is to start delegating tasks to the team and not to be working on them solely as an individual that would get you back to the developer role.

If you find yourself in dilemma whether to delegate a task, you should even though be aiming to delegate it and not be tempted to complete the task on your own because it’s seems to be faster. It might be faster in the short term but in the long term it my have undesired effects.

In this situation making the task’s both technical and product description more detailed will help the team members to avoid common mistakes when developing the features because of the detailed description which limits any deviations from the desired technological solution.

By not delegating the work, you’re making yourself a super busy bottle neck, the workflow will then become clogged and you’re risking the project won’t meet the deadline as the project roadmap already counts on the work to be delegated and not be completed solely by one person only. On the other hand, if you decide to put effort into delegating, you can gradually expect more time for yourself to focus on important aspects such as leading the team, educating it’s memebers and making sure the project’s on the right track. So why not start delegating today?