A lot depends on the team lead - the effectiveness of the team, the achievement of the set goals, the professional growth of employees. And to understand the nuances of the team lead's work, we talked with Ivan Mikheev, Deputy CTO at AGIMA. Ivan has many years of experience in managing large teams, including a development department with a total output of 10,000 to 15,000 hours per month: PHP, Python, Mobile, Front-End, DevOps, QA.
About team lead, his qualities and skills
The larger the team, the more different specialists it includes, the more difficult it is to manage such a team. A team leader needs to be a tactician, strategist, and technical advisor at the same time. He must fulfill the goals set by the company and at the same time take into account the interests and needs of his team.
So, a team lead needs to understand well the essence of the company's business, its values and structure. He also needs to be clearly aware of what the company wants from the developers, what goals the team should achieve and in what time frame. This understanding of the team lead needs to be conveyed to all team members so that each of them knows what needs to be done and why.
In addition to the professional skills of the developer, the team lead needs:
- mastery of the meeting facilitation technique ;
- the ability to build communications;
- the ability to distribute both tasks and responsibilities;
- ability to localize conflict situations in a team;
- empathy, communication and attentiveness.
The main tasks that the team leader will need to work with every day:
- people and team management;
- project management;
- knowledge of technologies and their use;
- business process management.
About team formation and its life stages
To build a team, you need to understand the profile of the candidates, their technical skills and what functions each team member will cover. The best option is to first think over the composition of the team, and then assemble it.
But more often than not it is not so. First, a couple of people start working on a project, then they understand that they are not able to solve all the problems, and they hire another person or several.
If you need to strengthen some link, add new competencies to the team, etc., then first of all decide what goals and functions each position will have and what competencies the employee should have.
To turn a crowd of developers into a well-coordinated team, you need to convey to everyone a common, understandable and measurable goal, formulate the principles of work and interaction.
Sometimes it happens that in order to achieve a common goal, the team lead puts a lot of pressure on colleagues, from which they begin to hate him and burn out. How not to turn everyone against yourself? The answer is pretty simple:
- give each employee the opportunity to prove themselves;
- deal with the growth of each employee;
- listen to everyone's opinion;
- make sure the team understands the overall goal;
- do not make rules that the team does not understand.
As for the stages of the formation of the team, they were described back in 1965 by Dr. Bruce Tuckman. According to his model, the life cycle of a team consists of four stages:
- Formation . At this stage, the team is highly dependent on the leader, it needs guidance and direction of development.
- Seething . Team members make some decisions on their own, without a leader. But people sometimes conflict, as they try to establish themselves in relation to colleagues and the leader.
- Normalization . Roles and responsibilities become clear to all team members, they accept them.
- Performance . Everyone clearly understands the strategy, what they are doing and why. The team is able to work for a long time without a leader.
These stages are cyclical, the team can go through them several times, but with each cycle its productivity increases.
Team communications
For effective communication in a team, it is very important to make sure that each member understands what his colleagues are doing. To do this, it is necessary to outline the boundaries of responsibility so that everyone knows where their personal “territory” begins and ends. The RACI matrix helps very well in this, which allows you to systematize all activities and events and visually show the team who and what should be done in this or that case.
This same matrix helps to identify communication bottlenecks and make changes. Let's say they hold a meeting for 10 people, after which they make a list of tasks without specifying those responsible for each task. This is okay if you write down understandable tasks like developing a website or launching an advertisement. Then the team members understand perfectly well who should do what. But when tasks arise at the junction of the functions of different specialists, they are usually performed either ineffectively or in no way.
What is the problem here? Team members do not understand where the zone of responsibility of one ends and the zone of responsibility of the other begins. Everyone believes that some task should be performed by another. Instead of going towards a common goal, people engage in formalism and argue about who should set the problem. To prevent this from happening, it is imperative to determine the person responsible for the solution of each such task, otherwise no one will take up the case. Even if the task is at the junction of functionality, it should have one owner who will be asked. And he must solve it by all means.
Another common situation: a customer asks for minor but important changes. The task is put into the sprint, and its implementation is coordinated by the manager and the team lead with the direct executor. The manager and the team lead can coordinate for a long time and choose an executor, who does not know when he will receive the task in his hands. So for such small edits, it is best to create a special communication line: directly connect the customer and the developer, even if this happens only during strictly allotted hours.
| Distribution of roles and responsibilities | For a better understanding of their own powers.
To improve the efficiency of communications. |
| A responsibility | To clarify who is accountable to whom. |
| Commitments | To identify powers. |
| Responsibility for work | , . |
| . | |
| . |
Regulations and rules play an important role in communication. But formalism often hurts, so you shouldn't impose them on the team. Artificial restrictions, as a rule, do not take root, but only create problems. It is better to focus on forming and communicating the team principles that people should be guided by when making decisions and when communicating with each other. This will help employees make decisions on their own, not be afraid of responsibility and implement decisions.
In some companies, principles are developed when creating a team (and different teams do this independently of each other), approving individual provisions at a general meeting.
About remote work
With the coronavirus epidemic, internal organizational processes have changed dramatically. This also applies to team management. The most obvious differences are:
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The team leader needs to address these challenges. For example, you have to arrange informal and informal calls more often so that team members get to know each other better. Working meetings should start with people chatting a little about free topics and getting a portion of positive.
Also, the leader has to arrange an exchange of experience in the team and carefully evaluate the employee's performance metrics in order to notice the drawdown in time and fix the problem. In our team, after switching to remote mode, the productivity of some employees has significantly decreased. At first, we could not understand what was the matter, we thought it was burnout, or the person lost interest. But when some were returned to the office, their productivity returned to dock.
The effectiveness of a distributed team also depends on the tools. The knowledge base, where answers to frequently asked questions are collected, and the task tracker, where employees can view their tasks and evaluate their progress, still play an important role.
Possible problems
Various problems arise in the work of the team. I'll tell you about the most common:
Disunity . Each member of the team "pulls the blanket over himself", efficiency decreases. The case when the efficiency of one person is higher than the efficiency of the entire team. At the beginning of a team's existence, such situations are acceptable and even useful, since the participants understand who is worth what. But if you let the disunity take its course, this will lead either to the rapid burnout of individual participants and difficulties in the project, or to its failure.
Broken communications.This problem can be easily identified. If someone needs to talk to more than two people to set a task, then the team is probably not going smoothly. Communication within the team should be as short as possible. Of course, there is no single solution to all communication problems, but the main rule is as few intermediary managers as possible between the task manager and the final executor.
Lack of a common goal. Perhaps this is the biggest problem, since in this case there is no team - there is just a group of people whose effectiveness is limited by the capabilities of the bureaucratic apparatus. That is, you will have to force employees to mindlessly do work, the meaning of which they do not understand.
This problem can be expressed in different ways: either only the manager understands the goal, or no one at all.
In the first case, not all is lost, the manager needs to estimate how much he will take off the operational work if he can ensure that all the actions of the employees will be aimed at achieving the desired goal. In the second case, it is more difficult: the manager must first independently understand the essence of the work and the overall goal, and then explain to the team. You look and he will understand.
Finally
The role of a team lead in any company is extremely important. He must professionally understand technical nuances, feel people and manage the development of each member and the entire team, achieving high work efficiency. Otherwise, the team will be just a group of people gathered in one place and performing similar tasks. The team lead needs to constantly improve their hard and soft skills, including independent work and / or additional resources like online courses , articles, videos, advice from colleagues, etc.