48% of leaders believe their company has high-quality leadership. However, HRs in the company don’t feel the same way. Only 28% of them agree.
Technical leadership is a challenging role; getting it right is more complicated than it seems.
Take a look at this number; Georgy Todorov of Thirve My Way says as much as 79% of employees believe they could potentially quit a job due to a lack of appreciation from leaders,
All these numbers reiterate the importance of good leadership. Therefore, in this blog, we break down different facets of being a technical leader and tips to be better consistently.
Technical leadership, often represented by someone referred to as the tech lead, is the process of managing the technical professionals in a company. A successful technical leader guides the development team and helps build the products and provide the services of a company.
Good technical leadership is essential for a software company to thrive and have its software and engineering teams happy. The leadership and direction they provide directly reflect how well-organized and efficient the technical teams are.
However, being a tech leader isn’t an easy feat. Often, these are the two myths that affect technical leadership.
A good developer skilled in their craft is indispensable to the team. However, while they can be good leaders, this isn’t always true. Leadership positions combine management with technical knowledge, and often they get tired of the former part of the position.
Dreamers make the world reach greater heights. A technical leader needs to understand the ground reality and formulate practical solutions. Dreamers can often get caught up in technical fancies and innovations, which can damage productivity.
Technical leadership qualities take time to achieve. The person leading the technical experts of a company must be able to guide and manage them. Technical skills are developed in their professional career, and some managerial traits are part of their personality and habits. Here are some of the important skills they need to have:
Often in a company, many decisions related to the product, team, moving forward after a technical setback, conflicts, and a lot more come up. They have to be equipped to handle them well.
A tech leader doesn’t have to be involved in minuscule changes in the codebase. However, when needed, they have to be a part of code reviews.
They must be able to develop the strategy for the team’s work, overarching planning, and ensure execution. These are all critical parts of project management that technical leadership must undertake.
A technical leader should have effective people management skills to ensure teams and motivated. If any conflict arises, they must be able to address and resolve them swiftly.
Often the team will look at technical leadership for solutions. Therefore they need to remain calm under pressure, consider all the facts, and ensure problems are solved quickly yet efficiently.
They need to be able to look at data, analyze it, and come to reasonable decisions that could have short and long-term consequences for a team, product, and the company.
The technical lead is often the bridge between the technical teams and stakeholders; they are also the voice of reason and authority in a team. Hence effective communication is an important skill.
Any leadership or management position needs people to uphold empathy and understand others, which fosters better relationships and an understanding dynamic within teams.
The people in leadership positions have to deal with people across hierarchy levels. With good interpersonal skills, they can help the team when needed and maintain the tone and culture.
A tech leader is responsible for navigating the change effectively and fostering a culture that encourages and embraces innovation.
Often a team will prefer to work in a way incompatible with the tech lead. However, they have to change their technical leadership style and adapt to the needs of the team and company more than themselves.
Technical leadership role involves more than just being tech savvy. It includes a wide range of responsibilities. Here are some of them:
This is often a debated question, and here is what we think. Someone in the technical leadership position should be able to code. They don’t have to code regularly; however, they are responsible for:
Technical leaders shouldn’t be spending most of their day coding but helping the team make better decisions, provide architectural requirements, and ensure seamless technical processes.
Now that we discussed skills and responsibilities, here are some tips for technical leaders.
A good technical leader will always consider the team’s choices and understands different perspectives before making an important decision.
Certain rules cannot be flexible; this could be a standard coding language, how team members treat each other, and ensuring there are no prejudices or discrimination in the team. There has to be a zero-tolerance policy for specific behaviors that must be clear within the team.
Documentation encourages proof of work and accountability. It acts as a knowledge base, reiterates processes, and helps other non-technical teams better understand the team’s work.
While we addressed the positives, it is essential to understand what could lead to bad technical leadership and how to avoid it.
Technical leadership members are developers or technically skilled in one way or another. However, in this position, they will be taking a step back from core technical work, providing the team direction, and doing managerial work. This could lead to distress as some find it hard to adapt to this role and get competitive with the other developers in the team. Technical leads must understand that their position brings the team and products together; getting competitive will only be counterproductive.
In the age of digital transformation, upskilling is necessary for every role, and leadership roles aren’t an exception.
"In a working world where the speed and scale of innovation is faster than ever, one of the most important things a senior leader can do is to continually upskill," said Parvaneh Merat, Ciso’s VP of Training and Certifications
Here are some newsletters for engineering leaders that you can check out to help along the way.
A leadership position can often feel lonely and overburdened. They must make difficult decisions and consistently ensure the team is motivated and provides direction. This usually ends up with technical leaders taking on more work and trying to do a lot on their own, which could build resentment toward the team. This is among the biggest mistakes technical leadership people make.
Instead of working alone, they need to trust their team members, delegate tasks and involve the team in their tasks as much as possible.
In tandem with the point above, working in silos also leads them to make decisions alone. However, it is essential to understand the importance of client management and involve company management, business partners, and board members in more significant decisions. And include team members as well as they are also stakeholders too. This helps maintain relations and brings unique perspectives to make better-informed decisions.
Every employee in a company plays a role; however, leaders define direction. A technical leader formulates the direction of the company’s products and services and technical capabilities. These have ripple effects throughout the company. Marketing, sales, and every other department are built around this vision.
Therefore as technical leaders, they are the captain of the ship. They need to be up for the responsibility and understand their role in ensuring the ship is not only staying afloat but also steered in the right direction.
We at Typo understand this can also be challenging at the same time. We have built a product that will help you and your team work more efficiently, gain engineering insights, focus on team performance and wellbeing, and steer your engineering efforts to align with business goals.
Here’s a snippet of our product:
If you are looking for a leadership position, we hope you learned something today. Good luck!
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