Getting into Leadership you are immediately confronted with a major shift in what expectations there are of you in your role. You are no longer a sole contributor. You’re expected to help others do their job.

The Answer is Yes

I’m honestly surprised by how much controversy there is about this, but yes, if you intend to a lead a team in any capacity, you have to know how to do the job they are doing. That doesn’t mean you have to be better than anyone on your team, in fact you shouldn’t be, but you need to know enough. This is pretty obvious when you are a team lead, but most of the back and forth on this that I’ve seen is related to when you get into management and your role is largely about managing people.

Managing

I’ve never met anyone who told me that they wanted to become a manager so they could do management things. That’s the price you pay, the overhead you incur, from becoming a manager. Most people that I know become a manager because they want to lead more than they are now. The problem is, when you get into management, you’re going to have a totally different set of responsibilities.

I think of Leadership as this balance between Strategy and Tactics in war. The higher up in Leadership you go, the more you are depended on for Strategy, and the less time you have to work on your Tactics. Strategy is what people are sought after in Leadership. Tactics is what you did before you started leading. Tactics is the code you wrote, the apps you made, the systems you built.

You won’t be able to contribute as much as you used to. You have to learn to balance the two. That doesn’t mean you can stop, though. Staying technically relevant will always be critical in all leadership roles.

How much is enough

So what are you supposed to do to balance? Are you supposed to work two jobs now? Keeping your balance essentially boils down to realizing just how much you need to keep up with to stay relevant in your role.

When you are a team lead you need to know a lot, it will almost feel like nothing has changed. In some cases you may even have to learn more in that role because you’ll be looked at as the one to give technical guidance. Team lead and technical lead can often be interchanged in companies which adds to the confusion.

Once you go from team lead into manager things will be noticeably different. Having direct report responsibilities is a huge shift. As a leader it’s important to remember that the reason you need to grow technically is to help your team, not to help yourself. And that boils down to one simple rule of thumb, you need to know enough to make good decisions for your team.

Decisions

I spent most of my career in software engineering teams. I eventually got into architecture, where my desire to lead really started to grow. I eventually became director for an architecture group, and I was really comfortable in that space making good decisions because I had been an architect for a while, so those decisions came naturally to me.

Then I was asked to move into Test Engineering. Now that was a huge shift for me. I had never been formally trained in the space. My only knowledge of how things were done was from tangential relationships watching Quality Engineers partner with the engineering teams I was a part of. Now I had to lead a few teams in a space I knew very little about.

It was scary.

I’ll be honest it was probably the most jarring shift I’ve made in my career. But when I took over this new organization I knew I had to get up to speed, and fast. Among all the other aspects of being a director, I dove into research and tried to learn as much as I could about the technology, standards, anything related to how “things were done” in Test Engineering. After a month I had figured out enough to get my feet on the ground. It was enough that I could see patterns forming from what my teams were telling me.

The path my teams needed to go down began to become clear to me. The tactics I had researched, learned, and internalized had begun to help me form the strategy I needed to develop. Once the full picture was there, I knew I had learned what I needed to get started.

The Best Decision isn’t the Perfect Decision

Knowing you’re going too far into the weeds can be hard sometimes. Developing a strategy for you team isn’t about making the perfect decision. In fact, Perfect Decisions can kill your team. You will become plagued with analysis paralysis. You have to be willing to accept that you are making choices on limited knowledge, and that’s ok. The worst decision you can make isn’t a bad one, it’s the one you never made in the first place.