3 Common Mistakes Technical Leaders Should Avoid
Leadership is a tough responsibility. Technical leadership is way more complicated compared to human-centric professions like product, marketing, sales, and human resources domains due to their handicap: soft skills.
During their career progression, technical people were guided to improve their hard skills like programming, architecture design, data structures, and algorithmic thinking. When they succeed in these areas and generate great values, organizations promote these people to people leadership roles.
In the last few years, I have seen many successful senior data scientists, data engineers, and back-end software engineers promoted to leadership roles ending up with failures and disappointments. The main reason was that they didn’t know what to do with the humans!
In this article, I will highlight the top 3 mistakes technical leaders should avoid in their early careers.
Improper Communication
Technical leaders can easily forget the human relationship and bonding factors of their roles. They always meet with their teams at official meetings; e.g. dailies, sprint planning, sprint review, architecture review, etc. These meetings focus on technical topics with a clear focus on the ongoing products and projects.
On the contrary, communication is at the core of successful leadership. In order to create bonding and trust, technical leaders can easily apply the following communication practices;
- Keep the team in the loop: Communicating what is going on in the organization with your team and letting them know to question the decisions are key for transparent communication. While respecting confidentiality, you can share what other teams are doing, what are the thoughts of senior leadership for the future, what are the challenges in the market, and potential areas of investment and improvements.
- Be interested in their lives: We don’t have Grafana boards to monitor and create alarms about the mood of our team members. While one person is planning a wedding, the other one can mourn the earthquakes in their homeland. You need to know what is going on in their lives, pay attention to their emotions, and support them as much as you can. Caring for their lives is the key to creating strong bonds and communication channels.
- Social gatherings: Most companies support their employees to meet regularly to have social events with predefined budgets such as quarterly team events. Even though these are great opportunities, they are not enough to create bonds. As a leader, you need to create and support casual social gathering opportunities for your team to encourage people to get to know each other and share their experiences, hobbies, and interests with each other. Some good alternatives are coffee sessions, cooking and eating together during lunchtime, online games, travel experience sharing, etc. The more they talk and communicate, the more they will act and think as a team.
Bad Listening
The difference between a good leader and a great leader is how much they listen to their team members and react to the given information. Joining the meetings doesn’t guarantee that successful listening. Also when the team members capture moments that you don’t pay attention to them, they don’t pay attention to you. Every action has a reaction!
Here are some tips to improve your listening capabilities;
- Speak less listen more: Leadership is all about listening, asking questions, understanding the ongoing topics, and trying to unblock your team members. In order to succeed in that, you need to speak less to give your the opportunity to your team to articulate their opinions. Consider every 1:1 is a session for the team members, not for you!
- Block your calendar and mute notifications: There are tons of different ways you can be distracted during a meeting; e.g. Slack notifications, monitoring dashboard alarms, troubleshooting messages, pull requests, etc. Before entering your meeting, you should mute all these distracting factors to give 100% to the people you are meeting with. If you think you are desperately needed for all those alarms, this is a good sign that you couldn’t delegate your tasks properly to your team.
- Be honest with your team: Leaders are also human beings. They can have bad days, personal issues, etc. During those times it can be hard to maintain your focus and energy during the meetings. If you feel you have one of these days, openly articulate it and propose to have the meeting for another day. This approach builds trust and transparency with your team and creates empathy. Also, it shows that you care about them and you don’t want to meet with them when you are not 100% there.
Lack of Delegation
The path to being promoted as a leader goes through being a great senior person. As a senior person, you showed outstanding performance in that your organization trusted you to lead people and nurture a culture in which you succeed. When you become a leader, you should say goodbye to the old version of yourself. You can’t continue on the tasks you were great at as a senior. Your main task is going to be people-related topics not developing products.
At this stage, you have to start delegation. You can’t be everywhere and you shouldn’t be. You should get close to your team, get to know each individual capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and then create a roadmap to delegate the subjects on your plate to them.
The benefits of delegation;
- Creating ownership: The best incentive in the world is to grant ownership of the subjects that are in the capabilities of the individuals. When people start to own the job they do, their outcomes become magnificent. You can easily start delegation by the tasks you were leading as a senior. You know the tasks and you are the best person to hand over them. Just onboard and hand over to the next best person!
- Time management: As a leader, you should be supporting your team all the time to unblock them at their tasks. This may require a great amount of free time since you can’t predict when you are going to be needed. In this regard, you should free up your calendar and manage your time properly. The easiest way to do that is by delegating tasks that don’t require you to be there.
- Focus on vision, strategy, and roadmap: As a senior, your duty is to develop items on the horizon. As a leader, your duty is to plan, create and manage the horizon. Delegation of unnecessary tasks gives you the time, energy, and focus to plan the next 2–5 years of your team, create successful allies in your organization, and keep things moving.
Thanks a lot for reading 🙏
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