I have been leading teams for more than a decade now yet I find it very challenging. I will walk you through my experiences and learning while leading a team and some of the lessons I learned the hard way.

It might help you if you are new to leading a team or at least force you to introspect if you are leading for some time.

I have split this blog into two parts, this is the first part in which I will explain the initial phases of leading a team and the next part we will see some challenges with wider teams and cross-team management.

I was exposed to team leadership very early in my career. Not because I was good in leadership but because I was comparatively good in technical skills and this is mostly true for most tech leaders. In almost every team I have observed the same things.

When you are young, good in tech skills and leading a team, some of the things come very naturally to you.

You do not feel any obligations towards teams instead you devote yourselves towards outputs. You measure yourselves based on the output produced.

I did the same, was focused on output and not focus on the team. Being a tech person I liked to express myself more, discuss best practices and guide teams when needed, the purpose was not to elevate them but it was something very natural to me since I like to teach people. But often I have seen new leads don't pay attention to best practices, guiding teams or team freedom. They always are in control, target the deliverable and mostly the committed timeline.

Because you are the new lead and probably have better tech skills, you are focused on meeting a deadline and deliverable and proving you are a good lead since you are ensuring timely deliverables. In most cases, I have seen leads taking the big complex work and often work as Swiss army knife. At this juncture of your career, you need a good mentor who can help you transition from techy to leader and learn some skills which can help you excel in this area.

I was fortunate to be surrounded by good people, a good team who stood by me, a good leader whose priority was team members and a great manager who puts the team before anything else.

The important lesson I learnt was that the greatest asset for any company is not the product or code but the people. This is the single biggest asset any organisation can have and the culture set by the leadership team of the organization.

I shifted my focus from code to people and started putting the team first and ensuring the members feel like a team and back each other. Any mistake made was a team mistake and not an individual's. Once you achieve this level of trust and atmosphere you will see the impact on delivery, quality and timeline as well. It works cohesively to achieve the target with better precision and quality and most importantly with less stress.

There are three phases of leadership, the first phase where you have a team do a good job, the second phase where you influence team/cross teams to do their best work and the third phase where you set the ecosystem where everyone does their best work.

After leading a few teams, I shifted to the second phase where I realized that I should not be the one doing most of the work but instead enable people to do the best of their work. We can not compare individuals and certainly cannot expect everyone to do the same things in the same manner. They are people, not machines.

We have to respect their individuality and help them achieve their best rather than competing and comparing with others.

Individual accomplishments will do nothing to your product, the team accomplishment matters and that decides the outcome.

As a leader, we have to create an environment where everyone is treated equally and everyone does their best work. Together it does wonder.

Often seen in the Heros culture where one member is super star and leadership promotes it. This destroys the equality in the team and is harmful in the long run. Our goal is to not promote superstars but to have everyone equally mattered and valued. The more cohesive the team would be, the better outcome they will produce.

If you have two teams one where you have superstars and a second which has average programmers with high cohesiveness, the second team would surpass the first team as they work as a single unit and have diverse skills.

This phase is the most difficult transition because learning a tech is easy but learning people skills is very difficult. You have to put your team above you and have no bias. It is hard because you have been a superstar and promoted to lead. It's natural to think that you are above others. This is the phase where you should start learning leadership skills as you have to unlearn a lot of things.

As I further advanced in my career, I realized the team was cohesive, I was treating them equally and was trying to support them to do their best work yet I was not seeing a lot of improvements in the team's outcome. The team was happy but I was missing something. I talked to my earlier leads and managers and they suggested working with individuals to upskill them. Mentoring was the most important skill a leader should have and I was so focused on my work that I didn't realise that people need 1:1 mentoring. Even if the team is cohesive the skill set has gaps and team members are sometimes not too open to get this kind of feedback from their team members.

This is a place where the manager should have regular 1:1 with team members to understand their challenges and guide them in this journey. I was mentoring the team but was not methodic and was not certainly doing 1:1's. I used to motivate them and guide them when they sought help but a proper channel of upskilling them was the missing piece. This not only helps in elevating the entire team but also helps individuals to achieve their goals.

In the next part, I will explain the other learning/unlearning you have to do as you move to the next phase of leadership where you manage organizations.