Behavioural skills, a special steak and my new path
Jose Luis Cardosa Manzano
Senior Manager / Head of Engineering and Delivery
Today I am gonna talk to you about the transition from a technical profile to a team leader and I will present to you something fundamental you need to know. You have to learn the importance of technical and behavioural skills, and specially the right balance between them.
First and foremost, in this path there are three distinct stages with a clear distribution when it comes to technical and behavioural skills:
I am going to tell you about my path from being an individual contributor to a leader of a team, but I am not going to do it from my point of view this time, but from the point of view of my best friend Antonio, who lived this first jump with me, as I went from being his technical colleague to his leader.
Antonio and I met when we worked in a software consultancy in Madrid almost 10 years ago now. We have been travelling together a lot since then, at least once a year, it is our thing and he always brings up the story of when I became his leader at that time, usually when he is a bit tipsy ??
When I started in that software consultancy, I started as a software engineer, I was very technical and it was hard to put myself in the shoes of our end users. Antonio and I were part of a team of 8 people, where we worked for the Condenast publishing group located in Paris, France.
After a year, our team lead had an injury and the doctor put him on long term sick leave. The team was without a leader, and in 3 months we had a very important delivery with Vogue, so there were two possibilities:
And nothing happened. The team was really not doing good in the first month of the absence, I saw this so I decided to step up, actually without realising at that time, but I wasn’t gonna let the team fall. I started owning more, aligning the delivery, providing technical guidance to other colleagues, etc... but without the official title. I did it for the team.
And.... We delivered Vogue, of course we did! I was not gonna let it fall.
The team lead came back after it, he thanked me a lot for what I did, at the end of the day it was his team but a few months later he decided to leave the company anyway.
After that, some days later, Antonio said to me: "Jose, what are you doing this afternoon? Do you want to grab a beer?" I don't remember the month well, but I do remember that it was a nice day to share a few beers on a terrace in Madrid, so my answer was "Let’s go!".
When we were ordering, Antonio said "I'm buying today, I have to start off well with the new team lead". I remember I laughed and said "Come on! Dont be silly! I'm the youngest, they're not going to give it to me, they would give it to someone more senior".
领英推荐
Just when the beers arrived, Antonio took his beer, toasted against mine that was still on the table, took a sip and started to tell me: "Jose, you are the one who communicates best with the stakeholders, you are helping and supporting everyone in the team, you listen to us, you intermediate and manage to unblock and reach agreements to get things done! You are taking most of the decisions in a very democratic way, thinking what is best for them and for us. Don't you realise that you are already acting as our team lead?”
He added "Raise your glass with me, the position is yours, for sure, you even went to Paris for almost a month to strengthen relationships with the client!".
He opened my eyes, I was doing all that without realising at that time (a clear impostor syndrome too) but in a way it was an accelerated and practical course of behavioural skills and I was not an individual contributor anymore, I was in that 50:50 proportion now.
We continued drinking, chatting about other topics. About two hours later, when the terrace was full, out of the blue Antonio took his glass, stood up and looking at the tables next to him he said out loud "Toast with me to celebrate that my friend Jose is unstoppable!"
I was so embarrassed… and when I was about to tell him off for what he had said he sat down, took another sip of his beer and said "Jose, I have worked with consultants that were very good technically, you are but you also have that ability to communicate and understand non-technical people, and translate in both directions to explain things so that everyone understands".
Finally he said "I'll bet you a very tasty steak that you get the job". After almost a month, in which we launched another client site, the director talked to me and said "Jose, you have been acting as leader and you have done very well, shall we make it official?"
I talked to Antonio to write this post, to be faithful to what happened and he said "That steak was the tastiest I've ever had in my life, because it had a special ingredient, the success of a friend".
The learning that I got and that I try to transmit to you is that if you are a techy and you want to become a team lead, you need to learn behavioural skills and also how to balance both, technical and behavioural in this first stage.
To achieve this, I need to say that working in consulting has helped me a lot, but obviously is not the only solution, although when you are starting this path is a great one, because it will force you to deal with customers and stakeholders. It will put you on the spot and likely gave you the right opportunities that were presented to me in that time. Some of the behaviour skills I learnt are:
Would you like to know how I went from leading a team to leading leaders? Could you cope with leading your current colleagues? Would you cope well with the imposter syndrome in such a situation? I'll read you in the comments
If you liked it, share the post in your network, so I can reach more people, thanks!
Lead with heart, lead with purpose
??????Senior Software Engineer ???Pruebas de Concepto y MVPs ???Scraping ??Data
1 年My friend, I trusted you from the beginning because you had a special anything in as you leaded, your path is being the clearest test PD: It's impossible to describe that tasty steak ??