Following By Example: The Role of Effective Leadership

There are any number of things that can work against a TTL‘s ability to perform his or her job effectively. These might relate to infrastructural limitations (i.e. availability or connectivity constraints), restrictive policies (e.g. information restriction, defensive internet / website policing), environmental inhibitors (e.g. fragmentation of time, noisy or interruptive work area, physical separation) or inter-personal difficulties (e.g. siloed specialist teams, dependence on (groups of) individuals with other priorities or skill sets, availability of key personnel).

As the TTL, it is typically your role to ensure that team members are shielded as much as possible from counter-productive working conditions; minimising their effects where possible and trying to effect some change where practicable. However trying to achieve this on your own can be taxing at best and near-impossible usually. This is where your own line manager comes in. Just as it is your job to work on clearing the path for your team to work at their best capacity, so it is your manager’s responsibility to enable the same for you. Having an effective and actively engaged manager is a – regrettably – often rare privilege.

Engage with the team and understand their project

Having an active interest in the project helps ensure the development team feel recognised, appreciated and valued.  This doesn’t mean taking an active hand in the running of the team, micro-management or making decisions on the team’s behalf, but just having a physical presence adds a great deal from a psychological point of view.  The TTL will generally feel that their work has visibility and adds value, the fact that management aren’t interfering but still taking an interest sends the message that they are on the right path and the TTL will feel that issues or problems will be taken seriously and can be addressed easily because the manager is readily available for those types of discussions.

Support your Team Lead and back their decisions up

Typically the TTL role has only implied authority but no formalised line management, financial responsibility or personnel (hiring) authority.  Therefore, when the TTL makes a strategic decision or delivers a communication around a particular issue, it is reasonable to expect that such an act is well-informed and well-intentioned.  In these cases, the TTL needs to know that their line manager has faith in their ability and will support their decisions.  If  the manager just sits on the fence or tries too hard to please everyone, then the risk arises of an implicit message, “You have no autonomy or authority and I will undermine your decisions if they don’t fit my personal style”.

This form of Defensive Management is destructive and shows that the manager doesn’t trust his / her own people.  People who feel untrusted have little inclination to feel engaged in their company or to bond together as a team.

The only freedom that has any meaning is the freedom to proceed differently from the way your manager would have proceeded.

Respond to TTL communications and proposals in a timely fashion

It’s to be expected and quite understandable that managers are typically busy people and are often away from their desk. The usual approach to this is for the TTL to send an email asking for a response or an approval for a particular action. Not responding (or – at a minimum – agreeing to respond by a certain date) sends a dual message of “Not only am I not physically present when you need my input, but I don’t view your communications as being important”.

This point relates to the previous in that a development team, and the TTL in particular, rely on the reassurance that the team is headed in the right direction.  Think of it as the “I told her I loved her when I married her” style of management.  If management aren’t treating issues, communications and requests for action with an audible degree of urgency (even if the response is, “let me think about it and get back to you by…”), then the team members are left to fill in the blanks to their own detriment: “my manager doesn’t respect this team”, “this company doesn’t care whether this team performs or not”, “I only hear back from my manager when something goes wrong”.

An effective leader is one who doesn’t need to interfere, audit or control the operations of a development team, but is available for discussion, makes a physical effort to show their presence on a regular basis and acts quickly on communications sent by the TTL or team members.  He or she will give the TTL freedom to act in the best interests of the team they are leading and the freedom to be wrong in the manager’s eyes.  In short, they act in a way that sends the implicit message that the team’s efforts are valued, respected and visible to those outside of the immediate project.

Recognising a team’s work and their efforts regularly demonstrates tacit approval, encouragement and respect.