Leading a team is an opportunity: seize it

One day I has to make a decision: either accepting a job offer to work ina field I always loved or to accept more responsibilities and lead a team of 6 developers. “I saw how you could empower that intern and get the best out of him. I want you to do the same with the rest.” That what my manager has told me when he negotiated me staying at the company with him to achieve the vision. Eventually I rejected the offer and I decided to stay. But why? I will share in this story the reasons.

Firstly, work has many types: solo, working in mid size team, and working in large size team. To me: I like all of them. For others, maybe they like to be solo developers. Every one of those types has positives and negatives:

• Solo: I enjoy working solo in my side projects as I love to take my time experimenting, learning new things, and making mistakes. There is no pressure to deliver. I work at my own pace. I choose the technology and what programming language to use etc. It is good for nighty development with some background music or TV series.
• Mid-size teams: I would say midsize teams has between 2 to 4 members. Usually in mid-size teams everyone have multiple roles. I worked in projects where I was backend and mobile developer at the same time. I like the efficiency and delivery in such teams because I feel like I am in a SWAT team.
• Large-size teams: Velocity here is high. Tasks have a lot of dependencies. Other team members are waiting for you to deliver so they can start and this is so stressful. But let me tell you something: I love this stress as it makes me sharp to deliver stories with high quality. In large size teams the long hours of technical/business discussions give me the opportunity to learn from others and share my feedback with them. So I learn a lot in a very short time working in such teams.

Reasons why you should at least try team leadership

• Enjoy the ambiguity: Ambiguous problems will increase significantly when team members start sharing it with you. Those problems have no silver bullet solutions. There is only the best answer for the moment. Solving those problems in this case requires identifying the trade-offs and balancing them, which means more discussion with the team. Problems usually come from one developer but I prefer usually to invite others to join us in those discussions just for knowledge sharing and thinking out loud with them.
• You will learn how to build a self-driving team: Being a successful leader means building an organization that is able to solve the difficult problem by itself. This is more “people management” skill than being the technical wizard.
• You will learn how to delegate: Delegation is one of those skills you need to master in order to build a self-driving team. It is difficult to learn. I made so many mistakes: delegation to someone who is full of tasks, delegate to myself where some others have nothing to do. Think about delegation as you are sharing your plate with others. Being too generous will overload the team, increase stress, and the team will not be productive. Keep the tasks for yourself you will become a single point of failure, stressing yourself, and there will be no self-driving team as nobody is learning. You need to think about it as this plate is for everyone. You have a piece of it, other team members“deserve” to have a piece from it because they are leaders and they “deserve” to learn and grow.
• You will learn how to protect your team: Sometimes you will get into organizational politics, which may hurt the harmony of the team. Your responsibility is to protect them from any kind of hits.

Leading a team is not always available. I sacrificed working on a field I like over growing my leadership skills. As a programmer I admit at the beginning it was so difficult as we love to work peacefully on our own tasks. But seeing the whole achievement of the team should be a reward as much as you fixed a bug.