Should you take on a Team Lead role if you’re offered one?
It depends on where you want to get to. In what direction would you like your career to move and grow. Sure, position sounds great and impressive, but your satisfaction may not increase. You shouldn’t focus on a position, you should focus on yourself and your progress. Take a piece of paper and write down what you don’t want to do. Then, if you know, try to write down what you want to do. Then, if the description of a team leader position fits your “want to do” list, definitely go for it.
If companies were more inclined to let leadership arise naturally, they wouldn’t need to produce so much hot air talking about it. Peopleware
Is the Team leader role always considered a promotion?
It is certainly presented like that. You will be responsible for your team members and their day to day operations and activities. It’s one abstraction of responsibility higher than when you were in a team. Its important for people to understand their job responsibilities. Who is responsible for what task and what is team work. “Well, its working on my computer”, or “I’m done for today” is not what a good team member should be saying.
Being a team lead “gives” you that extra power that is well embedded in our society. In a hierarchical society, the higher the status we have, “more important we are”. It makes you more socially dominant and more desirable. By Jordan B. Peterson, when in pursue for potential love partners women seek equivalent or higher of their social status, but only power “makes men more interesting” to potential women. Its a fact, women prefer “powerful men”.
Team lead cannot be considered as a resource for the job he or she was doing before. Let’s say you were on a Project Manager position, Software Architect or any other position that required big commitment. You cannot continue to perform well because of the constant context switches or conflict of interest. Team lead should be involved in more pre-sales actions like opportunities, estimates, features, processes, resource and time management etc.
Your technical skills will fade with time. That’s why you need to keep yourself challenged technically. Maintaining your technical skill gives you a chance to stay in touch with technology, keep you inner geek self and your engineering mentality satisfied. It will boost your confidence and will definitely help you to challenge yourself, your employees and lets be honest, you will understand them and the situation better. You must acquire new set of skills, like planning, people management, change management, influencing, etc. Plus, you will be faced with sets of challenges — more personal, interactive, delicate and sensitive which will emotionally drain you. You need to learn how to charge yourself.
“…but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you…“ said Liam Neeson and became an action film star.
The more you learn and educate yourself, the more you’ll want to communicate with the management and be in line with them and have their support.
Good team leaders are modest, willful, humble and fearless. They are seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results. There are two categories of people: those who do not have the seed of how to be a good leader and those who do. Good Leaders are people who could never in a million years bring themselves to subjugate their egoistic needs to the greater ambition of building something larger and more lasting than themselves. For the good Leaders the capability resides within them, perhaps buried or ignored, but there nonetheless. And under the right circumstances-self-reflection, conscious personal development, a mentor, a great teacher, loving parents, a significant life experience, a good boss, or any number of other factors-they begin to develop. For bad leaders, work will always be first and foremost about what they get-fame, fortune, adulation, power, not what they build, create, and contribute.
When management is not educated or not in line with the middle management the effects are felt down all the way to front line employees.
But the best leadership — the kind that people can mention only with evident emotion and deep respect — is most often exercised by people without positional power. It happens outside the official hierarchy of delegated authority.
Time to leave?
Another thing, if you ever decide to move on and search for other opportunities, outside your current company, you’ll find that quitting as a Team Leader is harder than quitting as an employee. First of all, being a Team Leader drags down very good conditions and benefits. Most company these days have good packages for TL positions.
As you brushed up your Team Leader skills, your technical skills may fade away. Majority of companies promote their employees to Team Leads, they don’t hire ones. They hire professionals on Management positions, so you’ll probably have to start again on a non-team lead position. Surely you will be more developed as a person, but keep in mind, it’s hard to roll up your sleeves and go “mining” again. In most cases, the best upgrades in life are typically downgrades.
All in all, overwhelming emotion, it feels like leaving your team, not the company, but in reality it should be the other way around.
People follow people, not a position.
Wait for your turn, or learn and move on when it’s time…
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, made a research how some companies became great in 15 years period of time and stayed great. He compared them with same companies in same branches that couldn’t sustain or didn’t become great. According to that research, to build a great company and make it sustainable, CEO is more likely to be promoted from inside the company.
Where it ends?
With you at a C-level position or with you beyond seniority in your field.
You can find challenges in every moment in life, your will is expendable and it drains you with every decision you make, from the moment you get up from bed till the moment you get back to bed. At the end of the day, its exhausting, that’s why you need focus your energy on what really matters to you and keep moving.
Maybe you’ll form your own company, maybe you’ll switch companies until you find the right fit, maybe you’ll stay and wait your turn for C-level position, maybe you’ll be their best technical person.
Whatever you choose, wear sunscreen…
