Accelerate your team as its Lead

Building software can be hard. Requirements can be swept under the rug, only to find out that: Whoops. We shouldn’t have forgotten about those. Stakeholders requests can silently be forgotten, only to be brought up later, eroding trust. Decisions can take a long time to make if the right people are missing, and even if the room doesn’t know they have the power to. Developers may also be blocked on their work with not knowing that one critical piece of information. Who best to alleviate the previously mentioned pains other than the team’s Lead?

Call the position a Lead Developer. Call it a Development Manager. Call it whatever. Even if you don’t have the title, the ability to influence and lead people to make the team’s product, people, or processes better are well needed in all development teams.

As a Lead, your back is on the line when it comes to everything your team does. The glory you pass down onto the individual team members, or the entire team. The failures you have to suck up and own yourself. Since the engineering lead is on the line when it comes to the team’s output and performance, it’s a large incentive to use your experiences, skills, and contacts to supercharge your team.

One of those methods of influence I have been using recently is picking up and coming to some sort of closure for decisions that haven’t been made, or information that is needed by the development team.

I am of the type of Lead who will perform a gut check and directly ask a developer if they’re blocked on missing information. If the way to unblock them is clear and simple, I point them in the right direction, backing it up with whatever details about the technical, vision, or user story – all without having to reach out to the person best suited to answer. If something is of importance, where the wrong answer could waste time or affect the product in a negative way, reaching out to the person who would know the answer is often necessary. Making it your personal mission to figure that out, and report back to the dev about the answer builds trust that yes, you the dev Lead can help.

Side note: If the dev is skilled enough in knowing a problem area and is able to talk with stakeholders or the people necessary to help solve their problem, encourage them to own figuring this out themselves instead of dealing with it yourself. Empowering your dev to be more independent through dealing with people they may not have met grows the number of contact they have, improves their ability to be resourceful, and can result in being more engaged with the problem. Since this may be an uncharted area for the dev, one on one time is quite valuable for talking about your report’s recent situations, helping them problem solve, and strategizing.

We are all in the 21st century working at high tech organizations – meetings are terrible since we have a wealth of different synchronous and asynchronous tools to get the same or better outcome from a meeting. Therefore I don’t like attending most meetings. Though sometimes you just have to get multiple people into a physical or virtual room and talk things through. Gaining the skills to be a meeting facilitator is very beneficial. It’s basically the practice of having an agenda, leading a meeting, keeping people on track, coming to conclusions on the talking points, and lastly creating action items. Without a meeting facilitator, it can be easy for a meeting to become taken over by one speaker or topic, leaving all other items to talk about untouched. Action items can also fall by the wayside, by either not being discussed, or people not being held accountable, which can absolutely demotivate people on the effectiveness of that meeting, especially if it’s recurring.

Sometimes you might be missing one critical person in the room. It’s always painful to know that We’re not going to get to a decisive answer on what we should do since we’re missing Jimmy. Getting good at honing in on this skill helps make your meetings productive, either by cancelling them to save everyone’s time, or consulting with the missing people beforehand. Giving this intuition as feedback to other people who host meetings can only help reduce this from happening in the future. No one likes wasting time.

It’s one thing to have the meeting and come out feeling Great! Everyone knows what needs to be done. Time to sit back and watch my genius planning unfold. Wrong. That’s half of the battle. You still have to course correct from time to time. This could mean following up on the people assigned action items to see if they need help or are blocked, freeing up devs from tasks that are of lesser of priority, and making sure the right people are being notified when action items are completed.

But when the stars do align and the team gets shit done, don’t stay entirely humble. Remember to give yourself some credit for accelerating the team.