Ask HN: How can I be a better team lead? (corporate)

14 points by m88m 6 years ago | 8 comments

After spending more than 10 years as Software Developer I was recently promoted to lead my own team (5 devs, 3 remote) working on a complex web application. We are doing daily syncs (Slack), but I still get blindsided with unknowns, bottlenecks and so on. Drive our throughput to the ground, and my weeklies with the boss to an unpleasant experience.

I’m in a in a conflict of measuring my people and understand what they do and if they do the right things to being too bossy and nudge them too much, which may hurt their productivity and retention.

- Do you measure your people and if so how?

- Do you have any kind of telltale to the health of the team/developer?

- Some kind of crystal ball that help you manage your team?

Any advice is appreciated.

kejaed 6 years ago |

Were you a team member on this team before you were promoted to lead? If so, it's going to be a tough road ahead because you are going from a peer / co-worker relationship to a manager & direct report relationship. These are tough transitions to make, and a reason the military will often transfer someone who is newly put into a leadership position.

Have you started to train yourself as a lead / manager? A couple of resources I've found useful in the switch have been Manager Tools [0] (book, site, and podcast) as well as The Manager's Path [1].

While his shtick can be a bit thick at times, I enjoyed Extreme Ownership by Willink [2], if only because it codified a lot of thoughts I've had for a long time. I've worked with a lot of military and defence so the stories and life views he teaches through didn't throw me, but I know it does for some people so YMMV.

I have found that the Manager's Tools suggestion that the single best thing you can do is have weekly one-on-ones with your team to be true. It can be tough, especially if you still have a lot of your IC responsibilities alongside your new team lead roles, but it is truly remarkable how much more insight you can get into what your team is thinking from holding these sessions. This is they crystal ball you are looking for. And remember, the weeklies are about your team members, not about you (refer to manager tools).

[0] https://www.manager-tools.com/products/effective-manager-boo...

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Managers-Path-Leaders-Navigating-Growt...

[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Extreme-Ownership-U-S-Navy-SEALs/dp/12...

anotheryou 6 years ago | |

+1 for [0] and [1]. Exactly what I settled on when jumping in to these roles and both great for giving you enough comfort to start acting.

Now I have to have a look at [2] and see if it's as good, too :)

I also struggle with being the product manager at the same time and also stretching beyond my team in that role, even if in my team it's just ~5 directs for now.

anotheryou 6 years ago | | |

found a good summary for [2], guess that will do for me: https://thepowermoves.com/extreme-ownership/

m88m 6 years ago | |

Thanks for taking the time to answer @kejaed. I feel like I’m nudging my team too much, I do these 1:1s on a weekly basis, but still I can’t say I find blockers and dependencies on time, and thus it prevents me from delivering my plan as I should. do you know methodologies or tools that can help me with that? Also, can you share how do you measure your teams?

kejaed 6 years ago | | |

I'd say don't think about nudging, you are the manager / lead now, so manage and lead. Take a step back (detach as Jocko would say) and when you do find the blockers and dependencies, think about what you could have done differently to find them sooner. What questions could you have asked of yourself or your team to have sussed them out when the time would have been right?

When you mentioned 'nudging', it reminded me of when I started to move into a leadership role. I was worried about pushback, but what I found is that the team was looking for leadership, ready to have guidance to navigate the organization and management, to pull different parts together so they could focus on a) what they are good at and b) what they'd like to be working on.

Measurement is the four letter word of management isn't it? It's something I'm always working at improving. Right now our KPIs are at more of a macro rather than micro level as we navigate the successful implementation of (more) formal Systems and Software Engineering processes. These macro indicators are things that matter to be business, like on-time releases, well estimated SW development tasks, and successful customer tests & deliveries.

But those are really AS9100 / ISO 9001 KPIs, and while important to keep an eye on from a company point of view, I measure my teams by the conversations and moods at coffee and the feedback during our one-on-ones. The work will always be there, and the team is not a KPI or sprint velocity, but a group of people just trying to do their best, and if they aren't, shoving metrics or backlogs in their face isn't ever going to help, but a conversation will. Just my two cents, I probably veer a little to the EQ side of things most days.

hitsurume 6 years ago |

Something not commonly talked about is knowing how to respect the IC's that a lead/manager will manage. All the bad leads/managers i've had, had always been people who would jump to please their bosses and take on horrible deadlines or scopes that put huge amounts of stress on the people they managed. This lack of awareness to a balance in productivity for personal gain is very apparent to your employees and they will lash out by slacking, leaving the company, or sabotaging the project just to get one over the lead/manager. The best managers i've had will push back against their bosses and tell them what's realistically possible to do because they're aware of their employees stengths and weaknesses, knows that en employee just had a personal tragedy and won't be able to be working at 100% for the forceeable future, etc etc. lastly i've seen companies try measuring things like lines of code committed per day, and that never ever works out the way upper management thinks.

Jugurtha 6 years ago |

>I’m in a in a conflict of measuring my people and understand what they do and if they do the right things to being too bossy and nudge them too much, which may hurt their productivity and retention.

Your approach will probably be tailored to every individual's characteristics. Some are laser-focused. Some know how to prioritize. Some will need your involvement to move forward, others will move forward inspite of you. Some get tired fast, others have a lot of stamina. Some can handle complexity, some understand business, some this and some that.

Clear communication is important. Your thoughts are only obvious to you, and they make sense mostly in your head. Writing them down exposes holes. Repeating sucks, but it's worthwhile when you say something and someone says: "You know... you must have said this a hundred times, but it's only now that it clicked.".

The major focus in my opinion ought to be the product, the roadmap, on the clarity of the objectives and making sure everyone understands what you're building and why and why you're not building and why, and what you will build but not now. When this is taken care of, people will get to work and give it a shot. If you want to measure something, introduce quantities for the phenomena that matter most, the output of the system: user satisfaction, experience, ease of use, stability, and work your way back.

Low tech things work: having a Slack workspace for users where all your team answers questions and supports users pretty much guides you. You prioritize the issues faster according to what's causing the most pain. When almost every message is on problem X, you have your work cut out for you. Suddenly you realise some of your users have low bandwidth and are the application doesn't even load. Who would have known? It also puts pressure on the team when real people are having problems, and it's also satisfying.

I've written a few replies to similar topics.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614372

op03 6 years ago |

Be aware there are different styles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_style

Find one that matches your personality [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Invent...].

Don't try to do things because its effective for some other manager, whose personality is different from yours.

Find managers/mentors within the org who share your personality traits/values and are on career trajectories you want to follow and talk to them regularly about your issues.