When I’m team lead, I look for people who love to keep other people productive. That means handling all the productivity killers in an engineering team: hiring and firing, inter-team meetings, customer presentations, reporting up and out and sideways, planning, travel coordination, conferences, expenses… all those things which we don’t want engineers to spend much time on or have rattling around at the back of their minds. It also means caring about people, and being that gregarious and nosy type of person who knows what everyone is doing, and why, and also what’s going on outside the workplace.
An engineering lead is doing well if every single member of their team can answer these questions, all the time:
* what are my key goals, in order of importance, in this cycle?
* what are the key delivery dates, in this cycle?
* how am I doing, generally? and what is the company view of my strengths and not-so-strengths?
* how do I fit into the team, who are my counterparts, and how do I complement them?
Also, the lead is doing well if they know, for each member of their team:
* what personal stresses or other circumstances might be a distraction for them,
* what the interpersonal dynamics are between that member, and other counterparts or team members,
* what that member’s best contributions are, and strongest interests outside of the assigned goals
For the team as a whole, the lead should know
* what the team is good at, and weak at, and what their plan is to bolster what needs bolstering,
* what the cycle looks like, in terms of goals and progress against them
* what the next cycle is shaping up to look like, and how that fits with long term goals
Hope you will find these tidbits helpfull....