6 Qualities and Best Practices Every Team Lead Should?Have

Hey, good news! You have just been promoted to a Team Lead (or joined as one) and want to hit it off with your VP R&D making a good impression.

Generally speaking, we are all very busy. VP R&Ds are no exception to that rule, and may have their plate full at times. Squeezing in into their busy schedule is hard. When you finally make it in, ensure you don’t miss this opportunity.

This is how you can do that.

Always Be Prepared

“Everything is a test!” (James Clayton, The Recruit)

Your 1:1 time has come. You enter the room and waiting for your VP R&D to open his or her mouth and start the conversation — provide updates or talk about decisions made by the leadership team, come with questions about your team’s status, provide feedback about your recent work, the works.

Sounds very reactive, no?!?

What if you embraced the following approach instead:

• Send a proposed agenda for the upcoming 1:1 couple of days in advance. Come up with 2–3 high importance topics and let your manager know how much time you’d like to dedicate for each. Be clear about what input (if any) you need from him or her. Invite your manager to review the agenda and add additional topics.
• Proactively discuss your team status. You can use the R&D’s real-time dashboards or come upfront with a PPT outlining the most critical topics. Quick review of your team velocity, burn-down, plan vs. actual, risks, challenges and relevant metrics should not take more than 10 mins and can serve as a great discussion starting point before touching other topics.
• Follow-up on any left action items since your last 1:1 meeting. Update your manager with steps you and your team have taken and the results so far. Keep her in the loop with Just Enough Information. Remember, you manager has already enough on his/her hands.
• Present any dilemma in a clear and concise way focusing on the options on the table, your POV and preferred direction by you. Don’t worry. If your manager has a different opinion regarding, she will let you know.

Remember, everything is a test. Constantly signaling to your manager you are on top of things, and two steps ahead of the game will ensure you manager feels she can trust you and can broaden your responsibilities when time comes.

Be Transparent

If there is one thing people hate is surprises (unless it’s a birthday surprise). In each organization there are dashboards to represent the most important metrics, weekly leadership meetings to discuss topics of high priority and the risks and challenges each team is struggling with.

Even with all this governance, there may still be surprises — a sudden technological challenge with catastrophically implications raised its ugly head while you were POCing and was brought up too late in the game by you; a promising key employee has decided to leave and you have not introduced any mitigation plans until too late; you planned a four weeks vacation during peak session and only brought it up two weeks beforehand.

Don’t expect your VP R&D to be on top of everything all the time. She may be totally swamped with all the data flowing in her direction. Assume nothing and make it your responsibility to update her as soon as possible with relevant information.

Don’t Give Your Manager Homework

Whether a small startup or a larger one, your VP R&D has enough on her hands. Asking questions that will make your her work harder, research or spend long hours diving deeper when actually you could have done all of the above is not a good practice. Remember, your VP R&D is probably also managing 3–4 additional directs to you. Selectively choose what topics you involve her in.

In those cases where it’s absolutely necessary, communicate that need in advance. Set the right expectations and come prepared after doing your homework narrowing down the amount of time and effort required on their end.

Excuses Are Never A Good Strategy

“Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can’t, Teach.” (Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman)

We all make mistakes. And so do you. It may be that you didn’t release on time for any reason, the latest service you have released has backfired on you in production or you were totally off with your time estimations.

Don’t try to buy your way out of it pinpointing external reasons. This only makes things worse.

The best way to handle such cases is to come forward and as soon as things happen and provide:

• Clear explanation of the situation — any information that can shed light on the situation, severity and possible impact on internal stakeholders or customers.
• What is your short-term plan to mitigate the situation?
• How does your long term plan changes as a result?
• In/external communication plans if needed.
• Lessons learned and action items taken to ensure such issue doesn’t happen again.

While issue is still “open” keep continuous communicating as much as needed both to relevant stakeholders and to your manager.

Doing so, your strongly signal to your manager you are on top of things and taking the necessary steps to handle them.

Give Before You Take

Adam Grant in his New York Times bestselling book “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success” examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Clearly giving others is one of those forces and you can harness it in your favor.

By definition it’s your manager’s work to remove any roadblocks and obstacles from your way and make sure you reach your full potential. Likewise, your manager needs your help to reach her full potential and successfully meet all team’s goals.

You can easily lie low focusing solely on your tasks. Sometimes, given the circumstances and timing that’s the right thing to do. In others, it may serve you (and your manager) well if you proactively look for ways to offload her where possible. It doesn’t necessary have to be something big. Even low effort tasks such as helping with coordination of the upcoming off-site, offloading with some of the reference calls of possible recruits or just taking the lead on the new sitting arrangement of the R&D team in a new open-space.

Driving such countless “low effort” tasks, your manager will highly appreciate any such help. And…don’t do that only because it may serve your own agenda in the future — giving (doing good) before taking is the right thing to do regardless.

Start Acting Like a VP R&D

If you want to grow into a VP R&D one day, start acting like one. Look for ways to expand your responsibilities beyond your well defined job description. That may be cross teams feature development effort that you have taken the lead on or a new procedure with positive impact on the entire R&D team you have recently introduced.

Any such positive contributing factors will signal your manager you’re slowly and gradually expanding the span of your capabilities in preparation for your next role.

Proving yourself to be extremely capable, trust worthy, organized, transparent and a great communicator will make it much easier on your manager when the next opportunity presents itself.

When the R&D team grows larger or a new outsourced team joins the R&D development efforts or when a new complex project is introduced, you will be highly considered as a natural candidate for leading such efforts.