Tech leadership is more about people than tech
Regardless of how many tools, technologies and techniques you know, you will always have to deal with people so you better get the hang of it
⭐ I talked all about this part of the TechLead Conference 2024 in Amsterdam: https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/tech-leadership-is-more-about-people-than-tech
I feel like I keep on learning this lesson over and over. 😬
It first hit me when I became a Tech Lead.
I saw it clearly in situations like:
➡️ When two developers fight for hours on what JSON parsing library to use it’s rarely because one is way better than the other one but because:
One of the developers has previous experience with a particular one and does not want to learn another
There is some internal competition between team members so they don’t want to go with the other library just for spite
➡️ When the team cannot agree on a technical approach it is rarely because of the programming language or architecture and more than often about the fact that there is no decision making process agreed on in the team so there is too much debate on everything.
➡️ When a timeline is not met it’s rarely because of the technical approach was wrong and mostly because:
The right expectations were not properly set with everyone involved
The team underestimated the complexity of the task
The team overestimated the complexity of the task
➡️ When there is too much tech debt is rarely because of the code and mostly because it’s not prioritised and discussed in the team.
Non-tech skills to develop as a Tech Lead
Once I realised this, I stopped trying to keep up with the latest programming languages and technologies and I started developing the non-tech skills required to be successful as a Tech Lead:
⏱️ Time management - moving effectively between people, tech and business all while keeping my sanity, it’s a continuous battle but there are a lot of things that help. One of them is the delegation:
🤝 Delegation - relying on other people to get things done, empowering them to take over tasks and ownership with the goal of growth and distribution on responsibility
👥 Group conversations facilitation - keeping people focused on the goal of the conversation and aiming for alignment, all while ensuring a safe space where everyone is willing to share their opinions and ideas
🤔 Decision making - exploring different decision styles in different situations to get to the best result (which for me is alignment between all parties involved)
📝Feedback - using the full power of feedback to continuously grow myself and people around me. I deep dive into this topic in these articles:
👥 Making use of 1-1s to build trust with team members and stakeholders
🗺️ Creating a technical vision together with the team and a plan to execute it
These skills allowed me to successfully lead high performing teams, resulting in significant positive outcomes such as the creation and maintenance of multi-million-euros products.
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It's insightful to see things this way. Often, it's not technical problems, but people management issues. Disagreements or problems usually stem from underlying communication and team synchronization issues.
That is describing who I am going to become at the next growth step as Tech Lead. Probably each company defines Tech Lead roles differently. However, the role in the article one definitely worth aspiring to.