Staying around in an organization long enough to get promoted into a lead position is one of the biggest mistakes some people in corporations do.

Poor leads who only got into a position by staying around long enough could be the cause of a catastrophic cultural disaster within an organization.  That doesn’t just hurt the company’s reputation and causes a high attrition rates, it also has a ripple effect in an interconnected world that could cause an entire organization to crumble.

That’s simply because leadership requires more than just experience and knowledge of the business domain and the technology.

Leadership requires special skill-sets in addition to the two mentioned above.

On social media, you will see a lot of quotes about how a leader inspires people and motivates them, how a leader needs to put the interests of his team before his own and many more like that. These are great, but seldom will you find an actionable road map into how to become a good lead in the tech industry.

Having the opportunity to work as a tech lead for a while throughout my career, let me share what has worked out for me, and show how each has person his or her own ways of finding the best way to become leaders.

Looking closely at leaders I’ve worked with, read or heard about, I’ve come up with few fundamentals that are the must-haves for a lead to become a good lead. Here’s my list:

Leniency

If you want to build a team of strongly loyal engineers, you have to be lenient. Leniency comes in so many different shapes as you can see:

• Be easy to talk to, the easier you are to talk to, the less you’ll be surprised by how your team members feel about working with you or on the project.

Being easy to talk to inspires transparency and honesty among your teammates which will eventually result in growth.  It will also help you easily identify what you’re doing wrong and be able to rapidly correct it before you lose your team.

Being easy to talk to also comes by being the person who is consistently listening to your team more than talking, trying to read between the lines about their problems, listening closely and very carefully to what they are trying to tell you. Not every person is direct and comfortable talking to people in general, especially in this industry, so being the one who is, goes a long way.

• Be understanding of people’s circumstances, put yourself in their shoes, help them through their tough times and encourage them along the way. Believe in people because when you do, people will come through for you, for your team, and for your corporation.

Forgive their mistakes, and help them overcome them, and learn from them. Don’t give up too soon. Be sure to try once, twice, thrice … whatever is enough to build an informed decision of whether your team member is actually trying to learn from their mistakes and focused or not.

• Connect with your team, learn about their interests and share your thoughts and your own interests. Find common things between yourself and your team. We learn about new technologies when we move to new projects, but we also need to learn about every team member’s interests and explore them with them. This is a bridge-building mechanism. When you do that, people feel more comfortable working with you and sharing their concerns with you.

Protectiveness

A good lead protects his team, has their backs and provides a safe environment for them to voice their opinions and supports them. This protectiveness comes in several ways:

• Internal Conflict, when two team members have a disagreement, you need to step in and protect each of them from losing communications and the willingness to work with each other by trying to bridge the gap and clearing any misunderstandings that may have led to a conflict. The best way to clear out internal conflict is to create a research session by gathering everyone in order to engage all team members in the research so everyone could grow and learn together.
• External Conflict, you have to have your team member’s backs when engaging in a conflict with an external team. Work with your team members to investigate the issue. If your team member is mistaken, own the responsibility entirely as a team and use terms like: “We have had an oversight over this particular issue …”, language is key to maintaining an effort of growth with the least amount of damage as possible.

When you face the fire for your team, you inspire them to research more, grow more and learn more before engaging in discussions with others. You will then create this internal need for them to make you proud and honored to step into the fire to protect them.

Inclusion

Inclusion is a key to maintaining a good relationship with your team. When you include your team in your decisions, they take part of the responsibility and ownership of the outcomes of that decision.

Be fair and give everyone an equal chance to vote for what they believe is the best way to go about tackling an issue.

Inclusion sends a subtle message to every team member that their opinion matters and that they are trusted to influence the direction toward where the team is going.

Inclusion also inspires growth and accountability. It encourages open discussions, more research to make a better decision, and more communications. It offers more opportunity for your team members to communicate and the closer they get to each other, the stronger their relations become which shall eventually result in a better culture and a stronger team.

Inclusion is favoritism worst enemy, the less inclusion you have on your team, the more favoritism will start to creep into your team, which shall result in isolation, silos, the optics of levels and other cultural diseases that eventually leads to a failing team and a failing organization.

Software is only a reflection of our communications, if we are closely connected to each other, the software we build is going to be just that. The further away we silo ourselves, however, the worst the product we build shall become.

I’ve seen some people who think being tough and intimidating is a good thing to have as a leader. Historically speaking, those fear-inducing leaders either ended up with minions around them, robots who have nothing to say or opinions to make, which eventually brought high stress on these brutal leaders than they could handle and led them out of their organization.

There are also the intimidating leaders who ended up being alone, with nobody to support the software. New graduates will join their organizations but soon enough they leave, because this is not the 1990’s anymore. People talk, communicate and read articles like this one that’ll hopefully inspire them to do what is best for themselves and take their careers in the right direction.