A simple way to know you're missing some leadership skills
Roy Osherove filed under First Steps during chaos how often does this happen to you as a team lead:
You believe in some great practices that the team needs to follow, but you can't convince or get the team to follow them - even the simplest ones.
If that happens to you - it's time to visit the idea that you may be lacking some core people skills, and leadership skills.
It's not your fault - we've all be taught as technical people that the only thing that matters is technical knowledge. not people knowledge. technical knowledge drives you to the top - and will also bring you down.
but if you can't translate that knowledge into meaningful actions by your team - it is as worthless as that 14 inch monitor you have lying around in your garage.
Leadership in software means helping the team achieve goals you believe in, even if they may not be convinced about them when you start out your quest. it's about making the team drive to that vision, at some point, without needing your help to do it.
but that takes, time, and patience, and sometimes - it takes a strong ego to not break during this long path.
I hope we all find that missing link soon.
Reader Comments (4)
First i would like to say that i enjoy this blog very much, thank you for that.
Second:
While i do agree that core leadership skills are lacking in our industry, i tend to disagree with the description of the problem.
Taking the approach mentioned (convincing people to do stuff they don't want to do), is in my view, problematic in the sense that the hidden assumption here is that you (the TL) are smarter than the team, and this assumption, in my opinion, is wrong.
You may know more things, you may be better educated, and you may think that this practice could help, but after you have given the team all of the relevant information it should be their decision to make.
My 2 cents,
Elad.
Elad - sure - in a utopian world.
I didn't say your'e smarter than the team - I said that as a team lead there are things you believce to be right, but can't get them done.
I can think of very few things worse than a team lead that says "oh, well, I *tried to convince them* but they disagreed with me so we didn't do it" about something as simple as code review, continuous integration, unit testing etc..
as a lead you are *paid* to get things done by leading the team there.
Ideally, technical people listen to reason and so will just do something based on regular facts - but is that really the case elad?
how many times have you seen people not do reasonable stuff due to irrational reasons? fear of change for example.
Roy,
In my response i did not mean the "oh, well, I *tried to convince them* but they disagreed with me so we didn't do it" attitude, this does not mean that as a leader one should give up easily on trying to convince the team to adopt this practice or the other.
And, if one would lead a team that after given the facts and data does not want to start doing unit testing for example i would try to seek the real reasons for their resistance.
I may be Naive, but i believe that intelligent people should not be "controlled", and that by forcing them to do this or that, you loose much more than you gain.
BTW - I personally rarely find that people do stuff "due to irrational reasons" - you may sometime do not understand why, you may sometimes need to dig deeper (who said 5 whys?) , and in my personal POV, fear of change is a very rational and legitimate reason.
I know I'm missing leadership skills. Your "You believe in some great practices that the team needs to follow, but you can't convince or get the team to follow them - even the simplest ones." is dead on!
Do you have books to recommend?
Pat