How to land your first team lead role?
This one is easy.
Fake it till you make it, right?
So you want the team lead role, huh?
Let me guess - you want to be that guy bossing everyone around, delegating
all the work while sipping endless coffees in those useless meetings.
I mean that grass is green.
If less work and more money are your motivations, you may
be barking up the wrong tree.
In fact, I know you are, and eventually you're going to start hurting other
people and most likely yourself.
So how can you know whether this is for you?
And if you do identify that this is the job for you, how
do you go about getting it?
In my opinion, leadership is all about service.
It's the bottom of the tree, not the top of the tree.
You work for the team.
And if there's a job that nobody else wants, it's yours.
If there's a problem that nobody else can solve, it's yours.
And if you just became the team lead and now you have more time on
your hands, you're a bad team lead.
What makes a good team leader?
Well, you have to know your stuff.
You don't necessarily have to be the best, but you have to be good.
You do however, have to have a burning desire to get the best from the team.
You don't just care about productivity when upper management is listening.
You actually care.
You care about the career of all your team members more than your own.
From this point on, if there are any mistakes, they're yours to own.
If there are successes, the merit is never yours.
It's your job to make sure that they get the credit.
To put it another way, if you're invisible, you're good.
When it comes to finding solutions, you're no longer pushing your own agenda.
You are empowering the team and finding the best solution.
That is the solution that benefits the business and the team.
If someone on the team came up with the idea, you highlight that fact.
So that leaves us with one last question.
How do you get this glorious role?
Well, you're going to have to be a bit more vocal than you have
been in those team meetings.
You're going to have to speak.
They do actually require your input if you want to progress.
You need to be offering solutions and keeping an eye on
the other proposed solutions.
You're always keeping an eye on the future.
So when someone puts forward a solution in the meeting, you're thinking
what's the downside to this solution?
What's the one thing that they're not considering, or the thing
that they haven't thought about?
How could we avoid them?
When you're communicating these things in the meeting, you're thinking
about what's the business benefit?
You're not thinking about your own glory.
So you might start your sentence with something like "I've been thinking
about what you've suggested there.
And I'm worried that we might run into this problem because..."
But never leave this on the negative.
So if you find fault with someone else's solution and you can see why
that might impact us in a negative way, you should be offering solutions as
well, and be careful to be considerate about the other person's feelings
who put the original idea forward.
So your next mission is to focus on the pain.
Is there a developer on your team that could use your help?
Get in there, be that person.
Don't take over.
Don't be that guy in the gym that goes around telling everyone they're
all doing things in the wrong way.
No one likes that guy, but you need to find the developer
in pain and offer to help.
Now, consider that management, although they seem to be rolling in money
and doing very little work, they're also in pain, but what is that pain?
A looming deadline, perhaps?
How can you make the lives around you, whether they're in your team
or they're the management, how can you make their lives better?
And building a fan base through generosity is a powerful thing.
To help with management, you're going to have to start gaining their perspective.
Look at things from their side of it.
Starting a side project is good for this.
Yes, you'll have to build the product, but then eventually you'll start to see
things from their side of the fence.
What happens after launch?
This is when you'll start to see why they don't care about
code quality as much as you do.
They care about the customer.
And an appreciation here is really valuable.
Without it, you're always going to be talking about different
subjects and never seeing it from the other person's point of view.
Now, all of this adds up, but it's never going to get you anywhere if you can't
explain all this during an interview.
Or a meeting, or you're going to be in a lot of meetings.
So action plan.
Start writing.
This will help you to formulate your ideas.
You learn a lot by teaching someone something, and that's
what your writing should be about.
You're teaching other people whilst also cementing it into your brain.
So what should your writing be about?
Well, you need to be able to communicate the needs of your team,
but also be able to marry that with the needs of the business.
So back to that action plan, what do we need to do?
Firstly, there are prerequisites.
And the first one is probably competence.
You can't be worried about your own competence when you're stepping
into this role where it's your main task is to help other people.
So you need to know your stuff.
Then, you need to want, and I do mean want, to be able to help other people.
Your job when you get here is to serve, and the way to get the job
is by being the popular choice.
And that means helping other people.
Once these things are in place, you have a foundation, but then it's
time to put the icing on the cake.
You need to work on communication.
Can you communicate your ideas?
And can you communicate how they will benefit the business?
This is the important point.
Can you communicate, without destroying relationships, where the team might be
going wrong and how you might be able to change things to benefit the business?
Can you always be one step ahead or at least have an eye on it?
And once you start being able to communicate this way in a meeting,
or maybe even when you get to the job interview for the role, what you'll
find is management can start to relax.
Why do they need to worry about all these things when you're one step ahead already?
Right?
So let's put this in three points that we can easily remember.
First one, and I do think it's an important one, is you need to start
thinking, is this the job for me?
Do you really want to serve?
And then two, can you start going around and trying to help people?
Start serving, start being the friend on the team that everyone needs.
You need everyone to believe that you're going to be that popular
choice for the role, because you've been helping out everyone already.
You're already in the job.
They're just not paying you for it yet.
And then comes the really difficult one for most people.
It's can you communicate that knowledge?
Can you show in a meetings and interviews that you're
already thinking one step ahead?
And can you communicate to the team that this is what's best for them, and
this is what's best for the business or why we should go a particular way?
So thanks again for watching.
I hope you've got some value from this one.
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Take it easy.