Effective Leadership in Tech Teams
How to manage and be good as a leader in a software development team.
All my life, I have been under someone who has given me directions on what, how, when, and why to do something. I’m 28 right now, which means I have seen quite a few things in my life that I can share with people out there. Being a leader or manager has to be one of the most fascinating aspects of life. You can’t lead properly if you haven’t been in a position of being led by someone.
I love history so much that I think that in an alternate world, I am a historian. Over the years, I have learned a lot of bad and good leadership from conquerors like Suleiman the Magnificent, King Loui the XI — the universal Spider, Queen Isabella of Castile and so many more. These people had their faults and weaknesses. You will forgive me for mentioning all of that anyway, I love my history and I don’t share it often.
But let’s get back to the topic of why you are all here reading this article. Some people are born natural leaders some are not. Even when you have leadership as an inborn talent, you have to express it, and with time you gain experience. It is an experience that will set you apart from other leaders.
Experience should not only be with large-scale teams, I believe that the fundamentals of leadership are the same whether a team is small or big. What’s different is the scalability of how you can lead and delegate. Think of it as an auto-scalable application, if more traffic comes your way, you can scale horizontally or vertically. As is the software case, scaling horizontally is the best. I mean, you have to adjust to the number of responsibilities you get but the principles.
Vertical Scaling will involve you as a manager accumulating more power and more authority as you try to exert your force on your team. That is bad leadership! It would be best if you never tried to gain control by using force on your team. The moment you start doing that, you are losing the battle because it just shows you have started on the wrong side of things.
Horizontal leadership is when you as a leader with your smartness give people in your team the power to believe they are leaders by themselves. In other words, giving people ownership of something in the team is what is good leadership. You have to make sure that people feel needed, and appreciated and at the same time feel like they can contribute something to the team. It’s up to you to start this process and it flows down to every individual. Each person will eventually know their position and role and therefore respect you.
Now that we have talked about that, I want to talk about how you can achieve horizontal leadership:
1. Be a great listener
Oftentimes, bad leadership stems from poor listening skills. I have seen this firsthand! If you can’t listen to your team members, it will be hard for you to make good judgments on certain things. Sure, you can talk and advise but you got to make sure you are a great listener first.
2. Be a friend
Yes, when you are a friend to someone beyond work, they will trust you and earn your respect. Don’t be fake though. When I was a college lecturer, one of the methods I used to improve my students' grades was to make sure I was friends with them first before being their teacher. I understood this because when I was a student myself, in subjects where I feared the teacher, I often didn’t do so well. Fear drives people away. As a friend to my students, I learned that when we became close, they could open up to me about the problems affecting their performance. As a human being, I could relate to and offer solutions that could help them. Notice, if I had been harsh and always tried to judge them, I would have never understood why they were failing. In class.
3. Be transparent!
Yeah, this is a hard one. I can tell you about one of my models in life, “if I know I’m gonna lie, I don’t say anything at all.” With time, I have learned that lying causes more harm. I mean it’s a universal truth right, right? Maybe not, but for me, I find it hard to lie to people. It is hard to tell the most uncomfortable truth to someone who is not a friend, this is why this point builds on top of point number 2 above. I’m more comfortable telling my friends if their ideas are bad or not. In fact, in my close circle, sometimes we have a call where a friend would just call and say, “Bro, just tell me the truth I will accept it.” It’s healthy, the reason for this is because we are friends and we know each other’s weaknesses
4. Treat all equally (No Nepotism)
I find this to be another big issue with managers. In any team regardless of so many factors, there will be different attributes and personalities. Just because you resonate more with one trait, that should never mean the rest are bad. It doesn’t always work like that. Good leaders have always treated people equally and fairly. Sure, we will have differences, but we are all here for a common goal, to get the company going. Let’s not start picking sides. If we do that, we divide the team.
5. Be a learner
No matter what position you are in in a company, remember you are a student of life. It’s your chance as a leader to have an open mind to learn new things. I’m talking about your teammates. It is, for this reason, you should never try to underestimate anyone on the team. You should be the one leading the learning sessions.
Maybe a history lesson while we are here
Almost all the times that Ghengis Khan conquered land back in medieval times, he would take the land conquered and tell his soldiers to share the land. Do you understand the context of this story?
The Great Khan understood that his soldiers needed to feel appreciated. Instead of accumulating land ownership himself, he decided that his soldiers needed to be compensated well. It’s what a great manager should do, make sure everyone on the team is appreciated and taken care of. Regardless of who they are! It’s very important.
I would share another story of The Condotieri but I guess that’s for another day. Until then.
