From Techie to Boss (48 months)
This is it. Final post of the series, as I think the transition is now over. In this post I will try to recapitulate what I achieved, learned and messed up in the last 48 months.
Achievements
Of course one of the perspectives on being a successful team lead are the things you contributed to the company:
- I have hired 15 people to work for me directly and on-boarded 4 offshore engineering teams (6-8 people SCRUM teams) in order to be able to reach the project goals.
- Under my supervision the teams have defined testing processes and methods that successfully passed the ASPICE assessment.
- We also build a testing infrastructure including some 50 HiL benches, integrated some off-the-shelf testing solutions and developed additional tools, pipelines etc., needed to “run the show”.
- Last but not least, we delivered the results needed from us and helped the project reach it's first carline SOP.
The fairy tale of managers not needing technical experience
There is this misconception that in order to be a manager, you just need to be able to create some sort of a plan for your team and then push them to reach that plan. In order to do this, you have to set up KPI's and track them daily. You do not need to understand what they are doing in detail, as your KPI's will give you insight if something is going wrong and then you correct it. You should empower your team to do their technical work and make decisions, which will keep them motivated and performing.
In my experience it doesn't work like that. If you are working in R&D and are leading technical teams, you need to understand at least 70-80% of the technical work and ideally you have done that, or similar work, yourself before. This is why:
Your employees will need on-boarding, guidance, understanding, help ... with their technical tasks. It's not possible to delegate all of these things to other technically more skilled people in your team. Of course you should get seniors to onboard and mentor your juniors, but if you exaggerate, then your seniors will at some point complain that they can not do their own tasks.
Your employees will need help in setting priorities and making decisions. This is almost impossible, if you do not have enough technical experience to do this properly. Let's take for example that your team is responsible for testing some software:
- If everything is 100% passed (which I would highly question 😆) , decision making is trivial.
- If a test report shows 80% – 20% rate, they will probably come to you to make a decision. How will you do this, if you do not have either the experience to make the judgment yourself or know someone, who can help making the judgment?
Manage expectations
Before I started this job, one of my mentors told me to get prepared to be a complain box. This is a sentence I repeated a lot of times in my head in these 4 years and to other people, when they asked me about my key learning's.
Basically a lot of people (your employees, your boss, your colleagues, employees from other teams, people from the company you didn't know existed ...) will try to dump their complaints, problems, requests, tasks etc., on you. They'll call you up, invite you to meetings, come to your desk, send you E-Mails, message you ... put your communication channel here ..., and try to somehow engage you in stuff that's bothering them, that needs solving or demands your support.
This simple strategy should help you not overload yourself and actually focus on delivering what you are responsible for:
- Who is the person contacting you? If not on your priority list, ignore them in a friendly way 😝.
- Listen or read carefully, but do not respond directly no matter how many URGENT, ASAP, CRITICAL keywords are contained in the communication.
- Take a minute to think about the content and ask yourself “I am the first responsible for solving this?“.
- If your answer is a definite YES, then add it to your TODO list.
- If your answer is a NO or UNSURE, just don't do anything and wait it out. If it really is your responsibility, it will come back again either with more details or more push by people payed better then yourself.
You can not solve all the problems that your team members, projects or company have. This is what the over-excited and over-motivated me from 4 years ago had to painfully accept, when I moved into stress levels that could have led to a burnout. You have only 24 hours in a day and 8 of those you should sleep. The rest needs to be divided between work tasks, private obligations, quality time with your loved ones and time for yourself. If you do not take time for yourself, you will burn out.
Accept errors
During my tenure so far not everything that I wanted to do or implement in the team worked. Sometimes I did something and it worked, e.g. team accepted it and it started bringing positive impacts. But a lot of times I also had to give up on something that looked good to me, but the people just didn't want to accept it. Of course you could try to push it thru with all the might, as you sometimes really have to do, but you should really be careful what battles you want to fight this way. At the end, you should not become a dictator ...
Accepting that something didn't work and openly saying “Hey, I wanted us to try this but it didn't work because ...” has two positive effects:
- You show the team that their opinions matter, dictators never last long.
- You show that you are human and make errors, which signals your people that it's OK to try something and fail, which is a path to continuous improvement and innovations.
Also important ...
There is a ton of other stuff that is important and you probably read it somewhere else as well, so I'll just list it and not go into details:
Build yourself some sort of productivity system like GTD or Second Brain. I used the Brainiac. You will have more tasks, projects, notes, E-Mails, messages ... than you can process in your head. Make sure they do not get lost and you can surface them when needed.
Treat peoples private life with respect and understanding. Any sort of stress or problems in personal area will directly influence the employees performance. Give them space and time to deal with it and signal that you are fine if they temporary cut down on their tasks in order to sort out their personal life. They will (mostly) come back stronger and more motivated to push things forward.
Panic and stress are infectious. Of course your employees will see that you are under stress, as we are all humans. But try to control yourself and openly communicate, e.g. like this “It's hard currently, too many things going around. My TODO list is bursting. I need some time to go thru all of this, maybe I will not be as reachable as usual but bear with me, we'll get it done.”, to keep the panic from spreading.
Keep a keen eye on the small changes in peoples behavior and communication, they will give you valuable pointers on what is happening in your teams. People will mostly not talk openly in a team meeting, if something dodgy is happening on the personal level in the team. But there will be some side looks, strange comments etc., that will give you valuable pointers for your next 1:1 sessions.
What lays ahead?
There is a lot of tasks, projects, problems, errors ... laying in front of me in the future. But I am not over-excited, over-motivated, scared, overwhelmed, inexperienced ... anymore.
During my tenure as a team lead, as well as in my previous roles as project lead and developer, I gathered experience and confidence needed to tackle those things.
Will I get it all done correctly? Definitely no, but this is also part of the journey and a possibility to learn something new.