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

Leadership revolves around having respect for your colleagues and believing in them. This component is very similar to an ability to maintain healthy relationships with family and friends.

Don't be just another software developer destined for a career in middle management. Spend quality time with your team and get to know them as people. Find out where they excel and assign responsibilities accordingly. The listening part will then come naturally.

The best advice I could give is, whenever someone you manage brings you a problem, resist taking it away and solving it for them. Instead, give them some pointers on how they might solve it, but leave ownership of the solution with them. This is hard to do consistently, particularly when it would take you less time to do the work yourself, but the long-term effect is that you grow a team of self-sufficient people, who only bring you problems when they have tried hard to solve them themselves and genuinely need your help. This in turn means your time is freed up to work on the most important things.

Agile Coaching helped quite a lot (even if you don't use Agile)[1].

A CTO of a very successful startup on the valley recommended me Difficult Conversations[2].

As long as you remember that empowering other people to do great work is very valuable in itself (as it is a multiplier), you can motivate yourself into getting to understand this side of software development.

It is not only important for tech leads, but for CTOs, and open source project leads.

Good luck on your new job!

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/sdcoach/agile-coaching

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-M...

Firstly Congratulations,

Now coming to how might probably go about this is awesome opportunity. Remember a very important thing about software today. Its extremely difficult to do anything big without a team these days. Even giants need teams. There fore I will first start out with both the Technical and Managerial areas you need to be aware of.

Technical:

As a manager, you might not have to know and understand each and every line of code that is out there in your code base. But you definitely need to understand enough technical details to consciously solve problems, take decisions and assign and referee things among team mates when needed. This means you have to on a day to day basis keep track of the developments. To me this can addressed by separately planning a part of the day, this can achieved in a stand up or status call, where everybody quickly reports three things "What they did yesterday", "What they are doing today" and "blockers". Your job is to first get sufficient perspective and context about he work your team is doing, incrementally know their progress every day and remove any thing that is coming in their way of achieving those tasks.

In turn you will have your own updates. Its not difficult with a little discipline. You can take strides.

Management:

Here, you need to take a little care. Planning, Prioritizing, tracking and course correction are crucial. They say, a true appraisal in any company is when the junior and manager know exactly where they both stand. A good appraisal has no surprises.

Talk to your team mates and be friendly with them as much as you can. Develop their trust as a friend. Most people will do work for your just out of politeness and courtesy. Never use provocation or threat as a means of motivation(Often geeks make this mistake). Try to take things as easy as you can, but be serious and stand up and make the person understand the seriousness of their mistakes. Stop there, no further. Basically they must respect you.

Trust them, or at least make them feel you trust them. Even if you don't internally. The reason being once they realize you don't trust them, they will loose all respect for you. They will fail to replicate the same feeling back. Work, productivity will dry out and ultimately lead to a separation.

No invisible assumptions. Neither assume, nor allow others to assume. Make plans, and prioritize, execute, track and course correct in iterations frequently.

Your job must be to inculcate this agile discipline, with as little distractions, more trust, friendship, higher productivity and aligned towards goals.

P.S :

I am not a manager, But I would like my manager to be like the one I mentioned. I admire some of my managers who truly were like that.

One little piece of advice: your priority is giving work to your reports. Avoid at all costs that they're idle. To achieve that, you must plan to be idle yourself half of the time, so you can attend them when they need it (they will.)

The other half of the time is to explain your bosses what your team is doing, so if you're thinking of programming yourself, think again.

Edit: for both halves you absolutely need to know at all times what everybody's doing, how they progress, what obstacles they're finding.