Technical Team Leadership

"Being an IT team lead is allot like being a really ugly mathletics cheerleader."
-g.dirlam 2013

Collaborative teams means that the team leader is there as a discussion moderator, he has little particular power. I like to say that I team leaders power consist of moderating the discussion, and controlling the learning syllabus. These are powerful tools when used in collaborative environments, the set the agenda of the team, and establish the team's technical trajectory.

The single most important goals of a team leader should be to facilitate skills enhancement and increase unit cohesion.  You want to create a process that bakes in cross-functional skills and creates collaboration and dependencies in your team.

The discussion moderator will be rewarded for having useful discussions and for the corollary he will be punished and made the subject of derision and mocking. Teams communicate with meetings, if they are heinous, it erodes the team's cohesion. Ending your meetings on time, and sending discussions that are not useful for the whole team to the "parking lot" are activities that will result in you making friends. If you run rambling meeting, your team will make you the butt of their jokes. Also it is a useful sign that the team is broken.

It is important that you start establishing your technical roadmap as soon as possible, and that you put some love into it. You will need some organic, growing artifacts to support your thoughts, and give them life. This roadmap will dictate the development of a learning syllabus for the team.

It is hard to get to the point where you have enough trust to share what you don't know. But it is exactly here that you need to get yourself and your team. You need to be open, you need to be fair, and you need to be positive for long enough that your team sees these as personality traits, so that your team decides they can trust you with what they actually do not know.

How could you attempt to fill in technical gaps if you don't know they exist? Why should your team point out things they are not good at, if you the team leader never admits to not knowing technical things. It is easy for us to say we don't know a business process, and say, look we say we don't know things, but then when it comes to the technical, we make out as if we already knew it. It is hard to admit we don't know something that we really should have known, but if you don't as a team leader, there is no way you will establish the trust of your team. Truth is an important foundation of life-long learning, and this allows you to set the team syllabus.