Tech Lead Delegation – Baby Steps into Leadership
One of the first steps a technical leader takes is taking over as a team lead. In IT, this is often called a Dev Lead, Tech Lead, or Architect, depending on a company’s teams and title structure, or it can be more understood than titled.
This type of technical leader might not have direct reports, but accepting ownership of the team’s technical success is leadership, and it’s one of the first big responsibility changes and perspective shifts in the process of becoming a technical leader.
Technical leadership means taking on ownership of a team’s technical success.
In the two-part series Technical Leadership Progression, we defined “technical leadership” differently – if you’ve read that one, here we’re using it to mean specifically the Single Team Ownership phase.
Zoom out!
The first step to is seeing the team as a whole, as opposed to seeing the individuals within it – zooming out a bit. Once you see the team as a separate entity, you begin to see its technical success as something that can be measured, affected, and improved.
Technical team awareness is seeing the team as an entity, and its technical success as your goal.
Thinking and acting at this level requires a vast increase in day-to-day flexibility because you’ll need to respond to what the people on the team need you the most for. It also requires a shift in focus – you’ll start to look at things like, how are code reviews going? How healthy and painless are the processes, like release, code check-in, and testing automation?
This new vision and its associated new mental processes and activities means that you simply can’t execute technically as much as you could before.
Technical Execution: doing the awesome work to make the (technical) magic happen. Writing code, deciding on technology, learning and implementing what’s new and helpful.
There are only so many hours in a day…
The second big thing that has to change is workload management. Everyone struggles with this one. If you’re inclined toward technical leadership, chances are you’re also an extremely hard worker – so you’re used to carrying a heavier than usual workload, and solving the problems sometimes inherent in that by just working even harder. You’re going to think that that’s the solution here, too. Hey, it’s always worked before!
Surprise! It doesn’t work anymore.
You’re going to have to level up a lot in task management: working on the right things, letting other things go, and working with the other leadership of the team (HR, Sprint Leads, etc) on expectations – for you and your team.
The secret to this is delegation. We know. Ughhhh. “But you guys,” you’ll say, “I am the best person to get stuff done!” Sorry, not anymore! (not really sorry)
This is team leadership now, and handing off tasks is critical to your workload management and the success of your team. Also your sanity.
How to delegate
There are some things to keep in mind when looking at your workload with an eye toward delegation that will help you figure out which tasks to give up:
- what you love (and hate) to do
- what your teammates love (and hate) to do
- what you’re good (and awful) at
- what your teammates are good (and awful) at
- resources on the team – who has time to do stuff?
Once you know all of that, delegate the things that:
- you’re awful at – especially if someone else on the team is good at them
- you hate – especially if someone else on the team loves them
- someone on your team needs to learn how to do
- someone on your team could accomplish more efficiently or faster than you (ever tried to write code when you have 3 days full of meetings? Not efficient.)
This is hard to do. Tech Leads usually love their jobs and they love owning things – so they jealously guard their workloads. And probably other people’s workloads, too. This is also hard to do because since you’re taking on a bunch of new responsibility and learning many new things as a Tech Lead, you’re probably drowning a little bit in work – and delegation takes time to think about, and sometimes time to do if someone needs to be trained.
It’ll be easier, we promise.
There are a few things about delegation that really will make your life easier.
First! You’ll move things that you probably couldn’t have gotten done off of your plate. You don’t have to worry about them anymore! Lower mental load is a big relief.
Second, Josh recently pointed out to a good friend that he got good because he had hard tasks dumped on his plate – and that grew him into the excellent Tech Lead/Architect he is now. People learn through challenges. And, since everyone leaves eventually, the people you delegate to need to have challenges so they can grow and eventually replace you.
How did you get good? You were given hard things to do and you rose to the occasion. Others need that to happen to them too, so they also have the opportunity to rise.
As your team becomes more skilled, they can handle increasingly more without you – which also frees you to focus where you’re needed.
Good stuff!
If you learn to let go of and hand off responsibilities, and you learn to trust and challenge others, good stuff will happen.
You’ll learn to understand and utilize your strengths, weaknesses, and capacity – and you’ll learn to do the same for the people on your team. Being able to do this is key to leadership.
Your team will get stronger, because other people are taking on the difficult tasks that you used to do and growing as a result. While they’re doing this, you can focus on making the team as a whole stronger – which will also help grow the people within it.
You’ll love making your team better, and that you’ll find more satisfaction in that than in doing technical execution – or you won’t, and you’ll know that technical leadership isn’t for you.
All of these require a shift in perspective, a change in focus, and time and mental space to learn new things. You can’t learn to be a good technical leader and do everything you used to do – so, unless you figure out cloning, you’ll also learn about and utilize delegation.