The struggle to become a ‘2020 tech-lead’
Such a mess is the perfect word to describe “2020”. Mental and physical exhaustion, feel overwhelmed and emotionally drained, but managed to survive in this chaotic world. Grateful becomes major key to keep our sanity.
A lot happen in a year.
Market crash, my wrong financial plan, then market bullish, managed to average down, take profit, and second chance to fix financial plan. On other side, my current project at office, gromart.club got highest hit 300k/days. After couple month, hit gromart.club down to 30–40k/days. Feels like riding roller coster.
Working basically become my surviving tools and completing my self identitiy. Meanwhile, i still have to adapt with my new role as tech lead, the struggle, under the circumstances, there are couple lesson that i learnt .
Get to know personalities
As a leader, we need to understand our team member to help us how talk to them, what makes them tick, ensure all of team member get opportunity, know their motivation. Everyone has their own motivation, so use motivational maps for every team member helps a lot.
By using personalities and motivation map, setup team much easier. I can match team and collaboration, e.g which type of work that will be suit to “The star” and “The expert”, how to talk with “INTJ”, how to solve conflict between each member, and so on.
Communications
Communication is one of the hardest thing for software engineer, but need to understand, communication will impact to career growth. As an software engineer, we expect to work with computer but in fact people work with people.
- Daily basis
Covid-19 hit us hard to have “asynchronous” communication. We never ever try to test work from home before covid-19, it becomes chaos , feels like office on the zoom meeting, really really exhausted, so we established rule of the game for communication, phone call is urgent, whatsapp and slack within minutes , email within hour, can’t have meeting without schedule, except emergency.
2. Deal with “special” team member
Eliminate them is not an option here, so first, tell them a direct feedback that their behaviour impact on other, sometimes people doesn’t realize.
Second, Give them consequences and offer opportunity to change within a specified time limit.
In the meantime, regularly to check their behaviour and don’t get too much focus on them, but some people doesn’t change, we have 2 options, talk to our boss how deal with them or limit their interaction to other.
Team development
Team getting bigger and restructured can’t be avoided.
Split team is neccesery to reduce bottleneck and communication overhead. New challenges comes, dependencies between team, different priorities and visions, and so on.
Scale up team is not that easy, and evaluation still needed. Team will go through team stage.
- Forming
Setup goals is a must when team was created. OKR is one of tools out there.
2. Stroming
It will be conflict in team, high tension, lack of participation but let my team leader solve their problem in their team. Encourage leadership is a must for improvement.
3. Norming
Each team member support each other, monitoring and feedback to improve their team to next stage.
4. Performing
Minimal intervention with team decision at the best, is painless and give them an opportunities to share to other or across team. As tech lead, to form team to this stage and watch team go all out is priceless.
Team needs time to perform.
People development
Everyone is so busy, executive is busy with their business goals, but as a tech lead invest time to people and personal growth will lead to improvement, productivity in the certain area.
Things to think about :
Firstly, know your stand, skill matrix and growth mindset help to define current skill of each team member.
Next, Set goals for every area need to improve based on their interest and company needs.
Finally, monitoring . “you can’t improve what you don’t measure”.
My me time
I am one of those software engineer who love play with such shinny tools , build my own radar, learn something new, and the most pleasure is feeling free without thinking consequences to choose technology or framework, it just fun and good for my mental health after such a hectic work.
At the end, there are many unexpected thing in life.
Let’s rock 2021 !