Lead Engineers are promoted to Team Leaders typically because they were great at completing engineering tasks.
A new Lead Engineer will transfer the techniques that worked in managing her own work, into managing the team. Most often, this does not work as planned.
If Lead Engineers managed their team exactly as they did their own work, it might actually work. But they don’t. They assign tasks, but keep the thinking behind them, in their own heads.
From the coaching file: Coach speaks with Sophia (S), a team leader:
As soon as you‘re told to integrate the database in the product (the task), your experience helps you picture the objective in your mind. You do not speak it, or write it down. You may not even realize you’re doing this.
- (S):”That’s right – I know what I want to accomplish.
Next you define the steps (sub-tasks) to integrate the database. You visualize it: first I do this, than I do this. In your mind each sub-task has an objective – but you don’t spend time spelling it out. You’ve done this for many years, and you were good at it.
One day, they said: “Now you’re a Team Leader”. Manage the work of these people. On that day, what did you know about managing people?
- (S): “Not much”
True, but you did know how to manage engineering work. It’s just bigger tasks. So what’s your natural tendency? You still picture the objective in your mind and define the steps. Then you call a meeting, and assign the tasks to your team members.
- (S): “That’s right.”
But get this: when you start out as a Team Lead, you think they will do the tasks as you would do them. Unconsciously you think you’re leading multiple Sophias to get this large task done. But of course, they are not all Sophias. Even though you give out the task clearly, team members execute somewhat differently then you would. They focus on different things.
So you say “why did you not do what I asked?” But their answer is always: “I did what you said!” Then it dawns on you: they did not understand what you meant.
- (S) “That exactly what they say – every time:” “I did what you said, why are you on my case?”
So what do you do, the next time?
- (S) “I try to define the task better. Also, I check on them more often. If they are going in the wrong direction, I can let them know quickly, and they can fix it before the review.”
Isn’t it time consuming and tiring?
- (S) yeah, but what can you do?
Actually, you could give them what’s been missing. You gave them the task, but not the picture in your mind of what you wanted to accomplish. They understand the task – but they don’t have your vision of the objective.
To my point – Don’t leave out the objectives:
Engineers can’t read their Team Leader’s mind. When they receive a task, they do what you used to do: They define their own “picture in the mind” objective. It will not be exactly like yours – unless you took the time to discuss your own vision of the objective.
A final point:
Handing out detailed tasks and checking often can work, sort of, if you have a small team and you don’t mind micro-managing. But it won’t work when you get promoted to lead 30, 60 or 100+ people. You will have to share your vision of the objectives and step back. If you haven’t perfected a method to share objectives when you led 10 people, it may be a bit of a learning curve to do it with 100. So why not start now? You’ll work less and achieve faster results.
I propose a definition of objectives here. I also discuss how to share them here. I offer it as a starting point you can transform it into your own method.
