Road to Destination 3 - First time leading a team

Team Leader (TL) is an interim position from which people will promisingly move up to the position of project manager and farther. So, it is a very good opportunity for people who want to move to the path of project management. However, there will be some challenges when you’re first time doing something which you’ve never done before. From a person whom most of people love to work with, you can make them love you much more or you can become a stress maker for them.

1.       Introduction

Via Road to Destination 1 & 2, I have given an overview of the career path. On the road to your expected profession, being a TL is one stop. In the world of software development, there’re two kinds of leaders: Technical Leader and Team Leader. In this article, I’ll almost focus on the Team Leader (TL). Being a TL, you start doing some work of project management such as estimating, scheduling, monitoring tasks of team members and so on.

Figure 1 Preparing for being a team leader first time

I do believe that most of people who are assigned to the role of TL have shown a very good performance and had very good achievement in the technical development work. However, being a TL you need more than strong technical skills.

2.       Problems

Mike has just been assigned to a new project as a team leader. In the former projects, he always completed his development tasks on time or even early. He also contributed some good solutions for the projects as well. As a team leader, he does not receive individual tasks as before, but the whole module to develop with his 4 team members. He begins with listing out what need to be done and estimates time before committing to the Project Manager. After that, he meets each team member to verbally explain and assign the tasks. He also gives his expected deadline. Mike begins seeing difficulties when running the team: ·         Some members couldn’t complete work as schedule ·         The team doesn’t care much on the project objective; they don’t really care that the delay of their tasks causes the delay of the team’s commitment. ·         Mike is not confident with whether he can complete what he committed on time. ·         Because of pressure, Mike sometimes loses control and speak/complain to his team members loudly.

Above is a common situation which I often see at new TLs. Some people can learn on the job and become matured with this role, but some others seem to be struggled for long time. To shorten the time of learning, I’ll share some of my thought on what a new TL needs to prepare to be ready with this new role. It includes preparing your thought as a TL, essential hard skill and essential soft skills.

3.       Preparing your thought as a Team Leader

Not being a boss but having new responsibilities: Some people may feel proud when being promoted from a project team member such as a developer, a QC or so. They may misunderstand and think that they now have power to ask people to do whatever they assigned. If I temporarily put aside the skill called leadership skill which is one of the most difficult soft skills, then the common responsibilities of a team leader will be:

·         Doing a similar task of a team member.

·         Planning tasks for the team.

·         Tracking tasks of the team to make sure the whole team work on schedule and within budget.

That’s all for a start! Thus, the team leader just simply takes two more responsibilities in comparing with a normal team member.

Driving team’s reputation:  Because you plan tasks for the team you should know the strength and weakness of each member so that you can have suitable assignments for them. The success or failure of the team will much depend on your planning.

Being a good example: If you don’t follow what you talk or if you don’t follow the organization’s rules and policies, your team won’t listen to you. So, be prepared to be a good example (or a standard) for what you want the team to follow. The leader does the right thing, all team members tend to do the right thing and the consistence will come.

4.       Essential hard skills

As said above, as a team leader you will have minimum two new responsibilities, planning and tracking tasks. In order to do this well, you will need two more hard skills:

·         WBS & Scheduling: This is for planning tasks. I won’t explain WBS in details here, you can quickly ask uncle Google for this concept.

·         Monitoring & Control: This is for tracking tasks. You should start learning and applying Earned Value. If the team size is small or the amount of team work is not big, you can just ask verbally for the task status daily. But I suggest the principle for this as below:

o   A task shouldn’t take more than 16 hours. If it takes more, you need to break it down.

o   A task should only have two statuses: 0% and 100%.

5.       Essential soft skills

With more responsibilities of being a team leader, you will be surprised when receiving so many requests from many stakeholders such as from team members, project manager, client, functional managers etc. At the same time, beside your individual tasks you will also need to take care of the team. If you don’t organize well, there will be a mountain of tasks in front of you, always. This is why you will need the two skills below:

·         Time Management: practicing this skill will help you to control your tasks, not let the tasks to control you. I have my own saying “I always have a mountain of tasks, but I always have time”. By understanding and practicing well this skill, you will see that although tasks keep coming, but none of them or very few of them are urgent or at high priority.

·         Effective Meeting: obviously you will need to meet your team for reviewing schedule, reviewing status, discussing project issues etc. Practicing this skill will help you to pay minimum time to get maximum result. Ineffective meeting will waste a lot of time and so … money.

Social activities: When loving you, people take only 3 from your 7 mistakes but when hating they will round it up to 10. This is why “social activities” is one of the important factors to help you to succeed in being a team leader. You need to accompany the team. Smoking, having meals, drinking, playing games, playing sport etc. are some examples.

6.       Conclusion

The skills and the thoughts which I have given here is only a start point. Depending on how much you involve in managing the team and the project, you will need to learn more beside the technical skills (or hard skills) which you have gained. Good luck!