10 Strategies For Effective Tech Leadership
Leadership is an essential aspect of any industry. My understanding of leadership and its facets became vivid when the founders of my current organization entrusted me with the responsibility of leading one of the core engineering verticals.
Three years back I was given the opportunity of leading my team of 2 members ( now 12+). I will be honest, at first, I didn’t have a clear idea and tried to incorporate a play-by-the-book style, which I tried to learn from reading & following a lot of industry leaders and trying to enact like the leads I had previously.
Very soon I understood, it’s not a straightforward process and that there’s no fixed rule for leading a team. Also, I feel, it’s an individualistic skill set that needs to be developed according to one’s personality and the team’s overall vibe.
To me, leadership is about working with the team to move in the right direction along with keeping the team happy, inspired and positive throughout the process.
Although I am very very new to this, definitely a hundred per cent work in progress, and many of the things that, currently I think, work out for me and my team can be totally wrong understanding, still being as shameless as I am, I feel maybe and maybe someone who is currently at my position can relate to this piece and take away a thing or two from it or share their thought process in the comments.
Statuary warning: Again, I am a newbie in the space of leadership, just started the journey ( 4 years and going on ) and these are some of my opinions which you may or may not completely agree with and that's completely ok, please do share your thoughts in the comments so that we can have a conversation about it.
Also, I am completely aware of the seriousness of the topic even though I have used some funny anecdotes here and there, just wanted to write this one as humanly and as possible because it's personal.
So here are 10 things that I feel are the most important factors one has to be very cognizant of while leading a tech team,
1. Working “with” team not above the team
I have been told by many that, leadership is all about the delegation of work and the lead only supposed to manage things. Well, I would beg to differ on this, I feel apart from doing the mentioned things leader should always try to involve in actual work so that with experience and knowledge he/she can guide the team members as well as learn from them where the team needs to improve or what they are doing excellently.
2. All’s well when everyone’s well
Mental & Physical health is very important for any individual to be productive in a persistent manner, that’s why we should look out for any potential signs of burnout or tiredness among team members, make sure they get proper rest and be mindful of their health.
One has to be mentally in the “let's do it zone” to be able to give 100% and it’s a leader’s responsibility to get the team members in that zone.
3. Taking the backseat
“I don’t know this, can you explain that to me” — I feel there’s no embarrassment associated with this statement, and it should be said very often in a team where you have very smart people.
Along with that, there are many things that I feel my kiddos know better than me, so when we are working on it or setting up a process around that they will be the driving it instead of me, the driving seat belongs to the ones who drive well. Off course, a leader must be sitting beside the driver's seat and helping them with the navigation and blind spots and if needed use the hand breaks.
The Participative Leadership Style from Lewin’s Leadership Theory says a similar thing.
Also, a very good example of the same is when I learnt about 3 Interesting Vue JS Mistakes from our engineer Vishnu.
4. Retrospect & Introspect
Always evaluate the process, my role and, most importantly, the team’s growth, as there’s always scope for improvement. Here at my current organization, we have a quarterly retrospect meeting schedule, where we do one on ones to understand how we all are doing, where we are lagging, the issues we faced in the last quarter, the mistakes we have made and how we can learn from those and make sure that it doesn’t repeat.
I feel these meetings are really helpful with the objective of the overall improvement of the team.
5. Celebrate Efforts ( Not Just Wins )
I have learned from a previous senior colleague, that enjoying those small victories always puts a smile on your face and keeps positivity in the space.
We live in an outcome-oriented society, where one’s potential or calibre is judged by the things they have done rather than the effort one has put in.
I feel in a team we should always recognize the efforts of people, and acknowledge/celebrate that instead of only partying for the big stuff or the major milestones.
Last year we participated in a competition, we worked a lot, sacrificed our weekends and sleep, yet we didn't win any prize. The outcome didn’t matter, we celebrated our participation and efforts. Read more about that here —
How Team Fasalians Built a Wellness Chatbot for RocketGov Hackathon.
6. Overcommunicate ( but don't be preachy )
Always be connected with your teammates and communicate well, it’s a pretty big achievement to get your team to share the negatives with you.
7. Cultivate Career Growth
When I was not a team lead I observed that, somewhere in the process of achieving the team’s goal, team members’ aspirations or growth plans take a backseat, So I believe we should try to align every individual’s personal career plans or growth strategy with the team’s roadmap, so that it’s a win-win for all the parties.
Though it’s very challenging, we follow some practices to ensure every team member's personal growth —
a. Open source contributions
We as a team always encourage each other and try to contribute to the open source community in our own time as it helps fellow engineers all over the world. Here are some of the amazing open-source contributions by our team —
b. Building things outside of regular work
It’s always great to upskill ourselves apart from the tech that we are using in our regular work. The way we tackled it is, we keep on improving our process through internal tools or libraries which are built with different and fresh technologies. We have built many internal utilities like Bash Scripts for repetitive code writing, a platform for managing i18n, a platform for app analytics by Smit or the interesting farming utilities built by Tushar etc which have improved the dev processes of all the engineers.
c. Taking Part in Competitive coding
Some of our engineers are avid coders and we always cheer for them whenever they make any breakthrough.
d. Writing Blogs
We have super smart engineers in our team and it couldn’t be better than them sharing their ideas and learnings in the form of articles which are very helpful for the tech community along with building a great personal portfolio for themselves. Here are some amazing blogs written by our engineers —
- Requests, Routing and Middlewares Explained | Guide to NodeJS Basics by Charchit
- Promise, Async, Await — Understanding and Implementation by Souvik
- Props, States and Events in Vue JS Explained with Code Examples by Mahima
- Beginner’s Guide to Deadlock and its Handling Mechanisms by Chaitanya
You can check more tech blogs from us here —
e. Participating in Hackathons
We have been participating in various hackathon events, which help us to connect with fellow engineers from across the globe and share knowledge in competitive environments.
Last year we won the 1st prize at the 2022 Meteor Hackathon!
8. Critique with sensitivity
Not always there will be only smooth sailing for a team, a high performant team also goes through a lot of issues. The only thing that makes a team super successful is how they deal with the issues. In the 4th point as I have already talked about retrospection and introspection in a periodic manner, therefore there will be feedback and improvement points for everyone and we must be very careful about delivering the right message in the right way, as constructive criticism is as good as its constructed and uttered.
The Tale of two managers
I recall I had a manager who was very loud and used to thrash left and right whenever we did any mistakes or sometimes without any reason, so many started to avoid thinking beyond the box because of the manager’s unlimited thrashing hence it might have reduced the team's mistakes but in the long term the team’s skill and innovation wrecked.
On the contrary, in a different org, I was fortunate to have a very different manager who was a soft-spoken person with very few words and surprisingly our team used to be one of the most highly performant ones.
Later I realised it was all about how our relatively quiet manager used to convey the messages with sensitivity and always backed our team with confidence, so even though we made a lot of mistakes it was always about how to improve ourselves and not be afraid of making mistakes or staying away from thinking outside the box.
9. Welcome with a big smile, Bid adieu with a bigger one
When someone joins an Org or a team, they come in with a lot of enthusiasm, interest and curiosity, and I strongly feel we should welcome a new member in the team with equal if not more positive energy. That creates a solid foundation for the relationship in the team, after which we should practice a healthy hand-holding process as the new member gets to know the work and the team. Hence communication becomes more and more seamless.
Similarly, when someone leaves the organization or team, I feel it’s more important to say goodbye wholeheartedly because it’s also a way of showing gratitude towards he/she for his/her time and efforts in the team or org. I have seen multiple times people joining back the old org or team, in those cases a good bonding and a good goodbye can make it just a resumption instead of starting anew.
p.s. people do say that we tend to remember the first and the last day in a place more vividly than the rest.
10. Have a good time
I strongly feel the team environment should be a happy and positive space, so we should always try to incorporate good heartfelt conversations, creating an ambience where everyone can share their honest thoughts/opinions, have fun events, and collaboratively do both work & non-work stuff ( e.g. movies, games, sports etc ) having a great work-life balance.
By the way, talking about fun, have you checked out the 101 Hilarious Memes That Will Make Every Software Engineer Go ROFL?
Lastly...
This article is completely dedicated to my Super Squad, I learnt a lot from them, this was a completely different genre that I have been working in for the last couple of years and it couldn’t have been better without the team I got. The kind of teamwork, dedication and accountability my team have shown is truly inspirational.
So from the bottom of my heart thank you and love you 3000.
