Becoming better Software Team Leaders

This story was born because in the recent past I had the opportunity to contribute to the path of some Software Engineers growing in their role of Team Leaders and Technical Managers.

They were struggling in stepping up as Leaders with their teams. They were all great Software Engineers, with the best knowledge and skills in their field: their authority, when coming to technical decisions, was undisputed.

And yet, these managers were having some difficulties in being “seen” as leaders from their teams, in being recognized and accepted as someone able to lift their group to “the next level”.

My first step while helping to solve this challenge was obviously to ask myself “what makes a great leader”. What are the actual traits and the skills that one has to have in order to perform better in his role of manager, coach, leader and sometimes even “mom or dad” of his team?

This talk is an eye-opener when it comes to understanding how a leader (without apparently doing much) can actually affect a team and its performance.

Many books will tell you what a leader should do and the principles that every leader is expected to follow. Looking back to my years of experience, I found my most important Leadership values being the following:

Try it yourself: Would you imagine to be in a relationship with a partner that lacks any of these values? And would you accept the same from a leader? Think of a leader without any of the values above and you will immediately see what I mean and how difficult could that be.

It is easy to talk about principles and values. A different story is to “embed” these values in our behaviors. We are all humans, sometimes we lose our temper and we are not always able to follow good principles, even when we firmly believe in them.

I wanted to provide some tools and guidance for the Technical Managers of my group. I was looking for a “compass”, something that they could use to find the right direction while growing in their new roles.

It helped me a lot to visualize my leadership skills as a temple firmly built on 4 pillars. The temple contains my values, but if I don’t connect it with the ground using a clear set of rules and behaviors, It will not be able to sustain itself.

What I call “the 4 pillars of leadership” are the following

In our Leadership group, we keep reminding ourselves that our Software Engineers are all great people. They just have different skills and traits, but they have equal potential and deserve an equal amount of attention, consideration, and respect. We meet periodically and we ask each other if we praised enough the achievements of our teams and if we have been available and supportive with everyone.

In 20 years of experience, I have seen many managers breaking this basic concept: we must give the same amount of guidance, coaching, and attention to every team member.

Probably in every field, and for sure in Software Development, you can’t provide poor, fragmented, summarized information to team members that you believe they are not “good enough” to do a better job while on the other hand deserving lot of time and attention for the “elite boys”.

The result of not paying attention to our bias is unavoidably a vicious circle, where the gap between favorites and “others” grows and it will never allow the latter to be in the same condition to excel in their role. If you want to build a strong team, you need to put everyone in the condition to perform equally.

Of course, there will be “champions” that will emerge among the other team members, nobody question this. But as a leader, we will be sure that we have grown to their maximum potential also team members that have different qualities. We will have a more solid, skilled team in its whole, not just two champions doing almost everything, and then when they leave we switch on the “Panic” light.

Few things are more demotivating and annoying than a boss that keeps cutting people short while they are talking. Or a manager that never asks his team members “what is your opinion on this”. Valuing people’s output is giving them the right importance, seeking their opinions, communicating that we have high expectations on them, making them understand that the leader respect and value their competences, their skills.

One thing that always struck me was how some Technical Managers, often quite senior in their position, would almost never consult their Software Engineers for technical decisions.

Considering the speed of the evolution in software technologies, a manager will easily find himself not being the most up-to-date guy in the crew. And yet, these managers often keep ignoring what their team members are suggesting, not involving them in technical decisions whatsoever, often not asking why their technical solutions should be considered, or what are the reason behind the manager decision.

At the end of the day, our Software Engineers skills and experience are the reason why we hired them, right? Why the heck a manager shouldn’t then use these skills?

The fact that there are entire university courses about feedback, not mentioning the number of books that have been written, says the importance of this matter for a leader.

There is no way to grow your team, to push their strength, to mitigate and smooth their weaknesses if we, as leaders, don’t learn how to give them feedback properly, effectively, frequently and having always in mind that we sincerely want them to step up.

This story represents a collection of my lessons learned while attempting to increase my skills as a leader and manager, a role that we are often covering without paying the right amount of attention to people. I would love to hear your opinions and comments as well as your ideas on the topic.

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