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By all means be friendly with your team but don't compel them into a one-sided conversation for the sake of improving them (or yourself). I'm sure they can manage their lives just fine.
#1 - He bridged the personal/professional gap well.
I've worked at good places and shitty places, but the thing all my previous managers always lacked was being able to talk with me at the level of... how my behavior might not only affect me at my current job, but at future jobs. Call it sort of the.. "one man's opinion" approach. Nothing ever felt like I was walking into a room to be fired, but if I was doing something stupid, he explained how choosing to stick to that approach might limit my growth there, how it might limit me elsewhere if I wanted to switch tracks. Every problem felt like it was getting advice from a mentor, not a manager.
#2 - He looked out for my career.
This sort of follows from #1, but he was always receptive to my input about where I wanted my career to go, how to help me get there, and what steps I could take within the confines of that job.
It was a PHP shop with limited upward mobility - it wasn't ever going to be Google-scale problems, and he knew that. He worked with me to try and help me find interesting avenues of work to pursue to keep me interested and to fit with the way I worked. You'll have people that prefer working by themselves, others who mesh with teams, people who enjoy both, and other sorts of combinations. He gave me choices. He asked me what I wanted. That mattered, to me, a lot.
#3 - He never tried to be an individual contributor.
This is probably the reason why I don't see myself being a manager in the future: I enjoy actually doing things too much. From chatting with him at a personal level, I know he liked to have input and do things as well. Despite that, he stuck to being a manager. If there was spare time, or something he wanted done that maybe would take a hour... he'd do it. He had the technical chops to come up with ideas, and debug things with the rest of the team while shit was on fire... but he was never trying to be an architect, or refactor large swathes of code. He was our manager; he had the background to understand exactly what we were doing.. but it was us doing it, not him.
Maybe the concepts/terminology are weird where you work, but it sounds like you're in a managerial position when you really want to be an individual contributor. As others have mentioned, you focused a lot on yourself in your post, and reading between the lines, it sounds like you'd rather be writing code than managing people.
Just food for thought. I hope you get some good feedback and can get your current situation pointed in the right direction.
Consider this: most people will like working for a lead who gives them a lot of value. This isn't necessarily an "education" -- that's not a really tangible thing that directly improves their situation, and it feels bad.
What a team lead can do, that does improve their situation, is allocate work that gives people the opportunity to grow. Work allocation is one of best ways to mentor a junior engineer, if you give them the right work. Andy Grove touches on this a little, when he describes "task-relevant maturity." Beyond that, engineers need projects they can point to, that show off the upper ranges of their abilities, in order to experience career growth.
Beyond that, the usual team-lead skillset applies: providing cover to do good work (redirecting bullshit), long-range vision and planning, and reducing uncertainty. Hope this helps.
This will only be an issue in the way you relate to them when they fail. Failure must be treated as a learning experience.
A good leader doesn't have to be best friends with the workers. Do your best work for your team, and hopefully they will respect you.
Make friends outside of work. Are you married? Somehow it didn't sound like it? Are your workers married? I used to be the most gung ho person in my office, and didn't relate well with my married coworker that had children. Now I am married and I see how priorities change.
Bottom line, chin up. You are obviously good at what you do, so just keep crushing it. And don't believe everything you read on HN
If you deliver great results, people will naturally want to emulate you.
A book that really helped me was "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
Best of luck to you!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For me, a team lead's role is not coding. You are there to assemble, manage and grow the team that will do the coding. I know it depends on the organization (and possibly the size of it) but I was always given the impression that team leads are generally expected to provide leadership (sometimes only technical) and do a fair portion of the work as well. Usually a manager would deal with the people stuff and a PM wou…
Yeah, to me a Team Lead is the programmer that gets called to meetings. Not a people manager. It varies between organizations, I'm sure.
The real measure of any kind of manager regardless of their title, be it CTO, CEO, Department Head, "Team Leader" or just "Lead Programmer", is just two things.
Do you get the job done?
Do you make things better for those under you?
It really helps to get feedback from your team, learn how to do this well and you'll be better at adapting to each new team you work with in order to be able to answer "Yes" to those questions.
> And I keep pushing my team to learn new stuff and educate them whatever I learn. This is likely a big part of the issue. You can't make them learn. > Just to let you know I constantly keep asking for feedback from my Reporting managers and my team and keep on improving. Wow. Chill out. No need to harangue people to get your job done. I'd say to adopt the role of team "anthropologist" and spend some time with them j…
>This is likely a big part of the issue. You can't make them learn. This is one I struggle with a lot. I love learning and if someone shows me something new I think they're awesome. Almost no one is like this. Most people don't give a shit about learning and just want to do what they've been comfortable doing for years before you came along and "messed everything up" by trying to create some progress in the way stuff…