Beginning of a Tech Lead Journey
Year of 2024, January the 2nd, the day that started a number of significant changes in my life, the day I have taken on a new role as a technical leader for an IT company. Month later, still there, it is a time to reflect I believe. As you read the lines bellow, remember, I am by no means an expert on leadership or on coaching, I am only a humble human trying to walk the path of wholehearted living for all people I can influence.
My first month started very calmly at first and it all looked as I’ll have a time to onboard myself, do all the certifications necessary and get a good picture of what the daily work practice is. I always remember one old saying when thinking back now:
“Man plans, and god laughs”.
As you can guess, it all changed rather quickly. Right as the first week has ended, my dear friend working for the same company and in the same role jumped straight into the parental leave and I had to take on his agenda. To be honest, at that stage, I was not afraid and believed I can manage, which I am proud to say, I actually really did. Well, sort of :) The real onboarding, certifications and other “nice to have” items on my to-do list went out of the window pretty quickly as I had two full teams of about five people assigned to me for a direct leadership to me and then I had another 5 teams of similar size temporarily. While that makes for a pretty scary number of developers, testers to manage while catering to the needs of project managers as well, there was no need for me to have regular bi-directional meetings with every single person.
It would not be possible to work properly with all the approximately 28 people and I was fortunate to be able to narrow it down to my direct reportees making it a much more manageable number of 10. With that in mind, I’ve started, albeit a bit slowly, with regular bi-weekly 1 on 1s and weekly team calls. Theme I have borrowed from the wonderful book of MBS “How to work with (almost) anyone” and the keystone conversation got woven into the fabric of interaction with all my people and the model of radical candid leadership from Kim Scott served and still serves me well in setting of the structure in the dynamic environment of my daily work.
Said that, I have to share with you the feeling I have at the end of the first month. Amazement. People, personalities, you take couple of teams and you have to work with every single person in a way that is fully tailored to them. It is oh so easy for a leader to project him or herself onto them, but, and it is a huge but, their lives are different, their thoughts are different, their brains are different, and hence, their realities are different. Even though I’d love to see everyone grow and be the best version of themselves, I should not force it. I believe that might be one of the hardest truths to accept when you care deeply about people.
And what about you,
What do you see in the people around you?
What do they see when they look back at you?
And, what is it you find to be the hardest truth to accept about others?
