But there are pitfalls in simply assigning a range of different responsibilities to your top performers: they stop doing the work they were good at and acquire a whole new set of skills. Take professional sports, for example: few of the biggest stars in any sport automatically become great coaches. Or journalism — what makes a great reporter doesn’t necessarily make a great editor.
Great developer versus great leader
Software development is no different. Successful software developers don’t automatically become successful managers. In fact, quite often, the very things that made a high-performing employee successful in their previous role may have hindered them in their new position. That’s because technical mastery isn’t the primary attribute of a successful manager.
Of course, a high level of technical knowledge is vital when you’re leading a team of technical specialists, but excellence in creating new products or fixing complex bugs won’t inspire the variety of personalities that make up a team. They’ll all have their own motivations, preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, and they all need to be properly guided and handled to get the best results from both individuals and the team as a whole.
Managing developers
Successful managers understand the types of people in their organization. Everyone is unique, but there are certain characteristics shaped by their roles that can help you understand how best to lead them. If we look at programming disciplines — systems, user interface / experience, and database programmers — they’ll all take different approaches to problem-solving. A manager may have a team made up of both full-time employees and contractors, each with their own challenges and approaches. There may also be cowboys who swoop in at the very last minute of a project to save the day, as well as farmers who simply keep steadily chipping away at the task at hand. Both are tasked with building a product effectively, and both will respond to different kinds of management. To make that happen, managers first need to build a team, and when it comes to that, there are a number of common challenges that will ring true for anyone who’s worked in tech. In particular: hiring, onboarding, and knowledge sharing.
The art of hiring
Many managers make the mistake of assuming that recruiters — internal or external — can handle the entire process of finding new talent. However, properly assessing candidates requires active involvement from their leaders and potential future colleagues.
A recruiting team that has to serve the entire business is unlikely to have in-depth knowledge or experience in evaluating someone’s coding ability. While you can assess cultural fit, only the people working in that department will truly understand the nuances of small teams.
Encouraging input and ideas from existing team members can help develop an assessment process that is fair, balanced, repeatable, and more likely to identify candidates who will quickly fit in with their colleagues.
Prioritize developer onboarding
Once a candidate has been hired, they must be onboarded. It sounds strange, but these are actually two processes. First, there’s the HR part: employee orientation may include all the paperwork, processes, and compliance checklists needed to make the candidate a legal part of the business. The second — and more important for performance and engagement — is functional onboarding. This is about getting new employees up to speed as quickly as possible, and boils down to creating a welcoming culture and providing immediate access to the right equipment and services.
Despite this, organizations continue to spend tens of thousands of dollars and many hours attracting and recruiting new employees, but only a small fraction of that on onboarding them. Employers can’t assume that signing a contract means they can take their foot off the gas — it’s only the beginning of the journey.
They need to ensure the onboarding process goes smoothly and reflects the business. Otherwise, they may lose the new employees they spent so many resources acquiring.
One study found that employees who had a negative onboarding experience were twice as likely to be open to new opportunities soon, while 1 out of 5 new employees are unlikely to recommend their employer to a friend or family member after onboarding.
Organizational resistance is another challenge that arises when a growing team slows product delivery, as everything becomes exponentially more complex. While growing companies need to bring in new employees to maintain progress, if they fail to onboard them effectively, they may actually see productivity decline.
The power of knowledge sharing
Communication and collaboration are vital elements of a happy, productive team, and they’re just as valuable to managers as they are to team members. Leaders need to listen, as well as create an environment that prioritizes knowledge sharing. This is especially relevant in the increasingly remote working world many of us find ourselves in, and it goes beyond simply sharing information within the team to include how teams communicate with other functions, departments, and business units.
Some managers may feel they risk communicating too much — in today’s climate, that’s impossible — but it’s important to remember that listening is as much a part of communication as talking. Everyone has a unique perspective or knowledge that others don’t have. Leaders need to find ways to access that insight and share it with the right people across the organization. This is where knowing individual team members, their preferences, and their confidence in communicating comes in handy.
There’s no point making an introvert give a presentation to the whole company. Instead, opt for small-group or one-on-one sessions.
Unlock technological capabilities
The key to successful leadership today is unlocking technological capabilities — anything that can help your workforce perform at a high level at scale. From technical onboarding to knowledge sharing, peer and collaborative learning to mentoring, coaching, and documentation. This is a challenging time for tech organizations; businesses need to be able to use technology to thrive in today’s markets, and engineers need to contribute to that goal.
In this environment, managers need to be as focused as possible on supporting their employees to work effectively, which in turn puts the spotlight on these leaders and how they guide, develop, and motivate their teams. From hiring and onboarding to individual guidance and how knowledge spreads across an organization, technical leaders are at the forefront of helping software development teams perform.
