“Rene’s theory of the first-time team lead effect”

Bad team leads sometimes suffer from the team lead superiority illusion.

You were put in a team lead position because of A] the perceived credibility premium: you know the business, code base, systems, and people better, and have over time built relationships of trust and credibility with key people (without appearing as a threat, more on this later) and/or B] the engineering premium: you are a better engineer that everyone else.

In some large corporations, there is a good chance it was A] and you have the answers mainly because of the position you are in. You give instructions and direction and oversight primarily because of the information you have due to the position you are in and there subsequently is a generally accepted and re-enforced learned notion that the lead is right or knows the anwers most of the time.

However this can lead to the illusion that you are a better engineer than everyone else on the team, which can be disastrous.

This effect is particularly pronounced in first time leads. Internally they think they are superstars, and their daily interactions on the surface seem to reinforce that. They can become arrogant and impose bad engineering design. If team members disagree with them, or worse, prove them wrong in the open, this hurts their ego, and the natural reaction is to use their position of power to inflict career damage in some way.

The problem with bad leads is that good engineers on the team leave. If you are on the executive team, you need to look out for this behavior below you. Closely monitor new leads in particular. Those in a position of power can distort facts easily, penalize this if it does get caught.

New team leads often grow out of this after some pain, some never do.

“Rene’s law of marginalized talent”.

Coming back to the part about not being a threat. Engineers who are good and therefore pose a threat to the lead will be marginalized by team leads that fall prey to the first-time tead lead effect.

“Rene’s law of great team leads”

Great team leads have an awareness that getting the best out of their team is an interesting problem and solving for it needs as much thought as a hard engineering problem. It takes analysis, tact, self awareness, and an understanding of what makes each human being tick — on their own and when connected to other humans on a team. Often it means means dealing with imperfect information.

Your team is a system of moving parts. Your job is to get it work to achieve your goals; analyze, debug and fix flaws in it; and perhaps to continually optimize it. Often this means harnessing your talent not fighting it.

If you are on an executive team you need to have training and policy and long term incentives in place that allows your leads to harness and nurture good talent without jeapordizing their own careers in the immediate term.

But thats the subject of another post.