InfoQ Homepage Team Leader Content on InfoQ
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Managing High-Performing Software Teams
High-performing teams expect their leader to enable them to make things better, Gillard-Moss said at QCon London. Independence in software teams can enable decision-making for faster delivery. Teams need empathy, understanding, and guidance from their managers.
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Fostering High-performing Work Environments for Software Development
According to Eb Ikonne, leaders should provide a motivating challenge or mission so that the software engineering team understands what success looks like. They can provide an enabling structure for effective teamwork, address things that negatively impact team success, and reduce or remove friction. Coaching can help people discover how to work effectively together.
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Transitioning from a Software Engineering Role into a Management Role
Software engineers who want to become good at leading engineers can use everyday opportunities to practice management. Peter Gillard-Moss gave a talk at QCon London where he shared his experience with becoming a manager, and provided tips and ideas for engineers aiming to become a manager.
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How to Prevent and Repay Technical Debt: What Teams, Tech Leads and Managers Can Do
Tech leads, project managers, and managers can prevent technical debt by giving software developers more time; in addition, they can plan for spare time and refactoring sprints to allow teams to improve code. To prioritise technical debt, development teams can show how much time we can save if we invest, and how complicated the software will become in the future if we don’t repay technical debt.
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Skills and Insights for First-Time Managers
The skills and capabilities required to be an effective first-time engineering manager are often orthogonal to those of an IC. These range from people management through to delivery of projects. We report on recent podcasts featuring Ben Greenberg, Matt Stratton and Shopify's James Stanier as they share practical management patterns for prospective, new and seasoned engineering managers.
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How Growing Tech Engineers Enables Growing Yourself as a Leader
It’s challenging to grow into a new role when you are still holding on to what you have been good at and really love, and what you’ve been doing in your previous role. By attaching to everything you used to do, you are also depriving the people around you of an opportunity to grow and learn to master those skills and take on those responsibilities too.
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The Engineer/Manager Pendulum: Charity Majors at QCon SF
Charity Majors, founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, gave a talk at QCon San Francisco about the pendulum of being a senior engineer and manager. She discussed the need for managers in technical teams to have engineering credibility and the value that comes from deliberately embracing both senior technologist and manager roles, but not both at the same time.
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Hybrid Leadership is an Issue of Equity and Inclusion
Lena Reinhard spoke at QCon San Francisco on Successful Leadership in Hybrid Environments, in which she explored why hybrid working is attractive for companies and employees, the risks and challenges associated with hybrid working, and why leadership in hybrid environments is fundamentally an issue of equity and inclusion.
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Becoming a Better Tech Leader with Coaching
Coaching, both personal and professional, can help to understand your potential and discover ways to exercise that potential in your daily work. For Maryam Umar, coaching has proved to be highly useful in her tech work of leading testers and engineers.
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Leading a DevOps Transformation - a Collaborative Engineering Approach
When leading a DevOps transformation, transparency and visibility can help to get teams engaged in chance. Once involved, developers can act as knowledge multipliers and contribute to change initiatives. A mixture of solving frequently-occurring problems, addressing complex problems, and showing progress of the transformation can help to keep stakeholders involved.
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Maintaining Psychological Safety under Pressure
When leaders are under pressure they can fall into dark side behaviours that can cause deep and lasting harm to organisation culture and psychological safety. Leaders need to be very conscious about deliberately managing their reactions and responses to pressure situations in order to avoid allowing what are often character strengths to be overused and potentially become toxic.
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Experiences from Getting Started as a Lead
Having a transition period to lead teams together with a mentor helped Dan Persa to have a smooth switch from senior software engineer to engineering lead. At Codemotion Amsterdam 2019 he shared some of his experiences and learnings, in order to inspire other developers to take the leadership path.
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Reflections on Technical Leading: Q&A with Julia Hayward at Agile in the City Bristol
Employers need to adopt fluid structures for people to find balance in their role, technical and managerial paths should lie side by side, you can’t have genuine effective growth without psychological safety, and a good mentor to talk about problems and scenarios is invaluable; these are some of the reflections on technical leading brought up by Julia Hayward, technical lead at Redgate Software.
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Leaders Discuss How to Build Great Engineering Cultures
QConLondon’s Building Great Engineering Cultures track brought together a panel of leaders to take questions from an audience. Leaders from Google, Sky Betting and Gaming, ITV, Deliveroo and GlobalSign shared how they support and build great cultures for engineers, accounting for individual growth, organisation need, a social conscience and a balanced life.
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Google: Managers Matter after All
Based on internal data, Google researchers have come up with 8 traits that great managers have, providing guidance and tools to other organizations to find out if managers matter to them and how to train their managers.