Ask HN: I just got my first team lead. What should I do?

"First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."

This is what I did in my role as team leader and earned the equivalent of Employee of the Year at a large firm. Its quite simple to say, more difficult to successfully implement and often even harder to quantify during a subsequent job interview, because when you do it well, to you its common sense or straight forward doing your job. As a result, its not necessarily easy to train into the behaviour of others. But it is quite easy to undersell (its easy for you) or oversell (can sound arrogant) how you did it and doesn't have the impact it should or could have on a hiring manager. Obviously referrals from those you worked with can be a much better testament to the impact you provided.

I came here to say exactly the same thing... so, here's my other piece of advice: Think about very good managers that you've had; what was it that made them good managers? Try to emulate that (for me it was the weekly 1:1).

Some of the comments below are a bit scary to me, it seems everyone things architect = manager and I work in a company where this is also the prevailing thought and I just can't agree with this line of thinking. There are a lot of nuances to developing a complex application and the longer someone gets away from coding on a daily basis the more they forget these things, they forget how to "think like a programmer", they overly abstract things and trivialize things. I can't help but realize that the "architects" who I have dealt with who no longer write code always seem to be stuck in the past, they want to use older libraries, patterns, etc that they used back when they were programming even if the prevailing wisdom of the platform currently differs. I guess the only advice is to be aware of this and don't become like this, you still should be at the code level, at least part of the time, if you are truly an architect and not just a manager.

For me, I was only able to learn through experience, but hopefully my experiences can help you avoid my mistakes. My first lead opportunity at my first company was about 2 years in. It was a 12 or so person company, and all positions were flat except for the owner. When I was promoted, I considered my new main goal in life was to improve efficiency. While true to a point, I decided that the way I was to improve efficiency was to start tracking every piece of work performed. I created elaborate tools to allow everyone to check-in their time, and built amazing executive reports to interpret this data. However, efficiency (or rather actual work being done) was dropping. Identifying this as a failure on the team's part, over the period of a year, I implemented a series of changes ranging from good cop stuff (take the guys out for team-building) to bad cop stuff (threaten pay-cuts, firings etc..)

Later at a new company, the opportunity presented itself, and I was sure I had figured it out this time. Around this same time, I was really into design patterns and diagramming. In fact, I felt as though every problem in life could be distilled down to a pattern. Every member of my team could fit into nice little diagrams as boxes, and the work would get done like magic. A designer was a designer, and programmer was a programmer. Everyone and everything was interchangeable. We could outsource work when we needed it, and get rid of people when we didn't.

A bit later at a different company, I was able to give leading a third try. Around this time, I was reading a lot of joelonsoftware, and randsinrepose. Instead of implementing anything, I decided to just try to eliminate obstacles for my team. I started weekly 1 on 1 meetings with my guys, allowing them to talk about anything they wanted for as long as needed. Lastly, I just tried to be the guy that I wanted my guys to be. I made a conscious effort to keep my morale up, not let things get to me, and lead by example.

Looking back, I see that in the first two, I was trying to implement things that motivated me. I love analytics and treating tasks as games. I love seeing charts go upward. However, management is about your people, not you. People are emotional and complex. This sounds pretty cliche as I write it, but try to improve yourself as a person, encourage that in your team, and the productivity / efficiency / whatever will take care of itself.

Good luck!

An MBA probably won't help you and may even make it worse.

The first step is recognizing there's a problem and seek help, which you've done and I congratulate you for that. I think you just have to be more patient and humble.

Even if you think you're the smartest person in the company, you have to learn that others can bring something to the table also. Just setup what the goals are of the meeting at the start then give people a chance to speak and withhold your own opinion until after you've heard everyone else talk at the end. Again don't try to interrupt too much and give everyone a chance to voice their opinion, and use it as an opportunity to try to learn something from others (ie. respect that others have something to teach you as well). And sometimes you'd be surprised at learning something you didn't expect or know beforehand that would change what you thought should happen.