Hi,
How can I become a team/department lead? I guess I’m starting to feel tired of having a vision and not being able to implement it because I have 0 political power in a company.
I thought that the easiest way was to join a startup as the first person of a “department” in a company, but now I’m not sure how it’s possible to get hired to a startup on the early stage.
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I’d like to humbly question the notion of “being able to implement a vision because you’re the department head”. Usually that just means more meetings.
Agreed. I’m a technical lead at a startup. You know that guy in Office Space whose job it is to basically ferry messages between the engineers and the customer? I feel like that is my job. I attend meetings and pass along messages because they are in a different time zone.
I:
- try to convince other teams they’ve done something wrong and they need to fix it based on analysis already done by my team
- preside over meetings where everyone summarizes and agrees upon root cause analysis that is already done by people on our teams
- babysit the change management process
- hound people for updates on things they are putting off
- have meetings with my developers where they ask me for a decision, then correct me when I’m wrong
- monitor the error queue and figure out what is wrong and fix it
Some of it is because I’m relatively new, but mostly my job is filling in for my boss in meetings because he’s spread so thin so he can focus on strategic stuff. I feel like my job is just to have 30 years of experience so people take things seriously when I say them. There are people who will ignore a request if it comes from my team, but are super helpful when I ask. There is clearly value to me being here, but I had envisioned something different with mentoring and doling out technical wisdom like “this doesn’t adhere to SOLID principles” or “the best practice here is to do this.”
The thing I’ve spent the most time doing developing a system where all the little shit I’m responsible for doesn’t fall through the cracks — mine or someone else’s.
Well, if meetings mean I can improve things for myself, my teammates, and company - I’m ok with that
It means you are invited to the most pointless stuff because someone from the team needs to attend and you have more experience on how the different teams interact (ideally, some people are there for the potential higher salary most companies structure management under).
Nothing of note happens 75% of the time (maybe being generous there). You just don’t want it to come to your team last minute about 2 weeks from release with high priority because it was “already discussed and agreed to” on some obscure 2 hour inter project planning session (recurring very boring biweekly meeting).
I had more power to affect things as a senior developer than a team lead on a previous company since I could actually make technical decisions and my boss (great person) trusted me since I spent most of my time trying to learn things (since I had the time to do so without the meetings).
I won’t tell you it could not work since you are allowed to make some calls based on your experience and intuition, which is nice and rewarding, but have realistic expectations to avoid being let down.
Being a team lead is not about using others to implement your vision. You’d be better off founding your own company.
Hi, maybe I chose incorrect words, but under a “vision” I meant “better ways to do my job, better ways to help others to do their job, and better/new ways for company/project be more successful in different business metrics”.
I agree that my own company would be the best case, but that’s easier said than done, unfortunately.
As lower/middle management, you are crushed from both sides. Upper management demands from you what to do, and the people under you hate what you are forced to implement. It’s actually really annoying and difficult. I was department lead and went back to just developing.
Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.
Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.
Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.
Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.
Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:
- you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
- other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
- the team will start outputting higher quality product
- life for the team will get more enjoyable
Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.
My experience might not match others but honestly I would recommend avoiding this trap. It’s just compromise and disappointment all the way up. Then you’ll be blamed for anything that goes wrong despite only 15% of your plan being accepted by executives. If the company culture is different and fosters leadership instead of stifling it then maybe it could work. At the end of the day you’re probably still going to be making someone else’s dreams come true until you start your own company.
I can only speak from my own experience and what I’ve seen, but generally the best leaders are the ones who emerge naturally from within the team. You shouldn’t need to “prove yourself” to your superiors but to your coworkers instead.
Most teams don't want or need a boss, they need a leader
I don’t know what your “vision” looks like, but start small. Feel like some manual task could be automated? Write a script and share it with the team. Think something should be done differently? Bring it up and see what others in the team think. The point is, you don’t need actual “power” within the company to start implementing your vision. Unless of course the company culture is just horrible, in which case you’d probably be better off looking for other opportunities regardless…
You don’t have to be the first person. I joined a startup a long time ago as a regular engineer and they made me team lead within a year. Startups generally move a bit faster and a lot more chaotically. Especially when they’re growing fast. You do have to be good but having a vision also helps.
I stuck with them through acquisitions etc. and everything slowed down a lot. Should have gotten out of the large corporation life earlier tbh.
Do good work, be interested and show interest, and be in a recipiable environment.
If your current environment is overbearing with power politics you don’t succeed in and you want change you’ll probably have to change environments.
If you want impact consider whether smaller companies and teams would be beneficial. You may be able to fill your desires of impact and control even without becoming a formal lead role. Or become one implicitly or naturally quicker in smaller less formal and structured environments.
You can also look for job offerings for those kinds of roles specifically. No need to seek out a climb in house when you can find more direct routes.
I think this really depends on the company’s culture and size. From my experience, having only worked in smaller teams, I’d say trying to partake in management duties proactively has probably been most successful for colleagues who wanted to lead.
So when your boss or supervisor has a meeting about your product, ask if you can join. If you have a well thought-out idea on how to improve things, like introducing better processes, fixing recurring issues, introducing better tools or something like that, talk about it. Being visible as someone who genuinely cares about the success of your team, product and company is, in my experience, probably the most important thing.
Just make sure this is actually what you want. Depending on the company, you might end up doing very little programming and lots of spreadsheets and misery instead. Find out what’s keeping your current team lead busy and ask yourself if that’s really what you want to do.
