When I first became a technical lead, one of my biggest challenges was giving up control. It wasn’t a matter of not trusting my team technically but I didn’t want to overload them, so I took on all the planning, all the customer interaction, and all the other jobs that I felt had distracted me from the job of writing code.
I was wrong.
I needed to let my team in, because they had ideas that I didn’t, they had capacity whereas I was a bottleneck. I was holding up my team.
But I needed to be sure that coding standards were followed and quality was maintained. You know who else cares about that? My team. I made it their responsibility to ensure that the code met standards, and pushed out code reviews. I put internal documents at the same level as code. Anyone can edit, but everyone can review, or veto.
I asked for honest feedback in retrospectives, and implemented changes, so they could trust that I was looking out for them, and I set them goals to improve, alongside the feature work : “can we release twice a week?” (challenge – automate the pain points); “can we halve the bugs found in testing” (challenge – better unit tests)
And the more I trusted them, with support, and understanding their limits, the better they performed. I’ve also worked with managers who don’t trust their teams. Those teams don’t work so well.
If you don’t trust your team, they’re not your team. They’re just people who work beside you. What are you doing today to foster trust?
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