Hi,

How can I become a team/department lead? I guess I’m starting to feel tired of having a vision and not being able to implement it because I have 0 political power in a company.

I thought that the easiest way was to join a startup as the first person of a “department” in a company, but now I’m not sure how it’s possible to get hired to a startup on the early stage.

  • slackj_87@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Been a team lead in title at my company (small software company, out of the start up phase, but was a startup when I joined)) for over a decade. Only figured out how to be a leader in reality over the last 5ish years.

    Do you want the title of team lead, or to actually be a leader on your team? Those are often two different things.

    Getting the title depends a lot on the politics of your employer. A good place will promote based on merit, others won’t.

    Being an actual leader is actually a lot more straightforward: serve the team. Be the driving force behind improving their work lives. That means communicating with them regularly both about what they are finding difficult (and then being a driver in finding a solution) and celebrating them when things go well. It means being a champion for the good ideas others have. It also means asking for help from the team when it’s needed; stay humble.

    Through this constant communication a couple of things should start to happen:

    • you’ll be able to piece things (solutions, product improvements, bug fixes, etc) more quickly, because your domain and contextual knowledge will be greater than those not serving the team.
    • other team members will start coming to you for things, people will naturally gravitate toward those that have proven to be helpful
    • the team will start outputting higher quality product
    • life for the team will get more enjoyable

    Do all that and people will start naturally looking to you.