Manage Your Team Composition
A leader does not have to be satisfied with what he or she finds or with what he or she is given. In fact, it pays to be proactive. Find out what skills are missing in your team. Rather than remain in that state and cause delays in application delivery, it is better to respond quickly and fix lack of a person with a particular skill.
For example, you may manage a team experienced in building server-side applications, but not experienced in writing front-end applications. Instead of letting them make mistakes when learning new technologies, it will be easier to introduce a person familiar with the world of Javascript to the team. That person will be able to teach others good patterns, which will reduce the number of problems.
It is also worth considering the team’s personalities - it might happen that a team with only “stars” cannot work as a team because each person wants to get all the attention. On the other hand, a team of introverts may have problems working with others, defending their own opinions, or dealing with conflict situations. That’s why it’s good to have a variety of personalities on board, because they will fill in all the niches that are needed to move the project forward.
Unfortunately, being a leader sometimes means making decisions to reduce the size of the team by people who, for example, have a negative impact or are unable to cooperate effectively. In general, we need to remember that we cannot always build a team based solely on the people we have.
Consider goals and costs
As a leader, you are responsible for delivering the next version of a product, and in most cases it will not be able to be perfect software. Choosing between two, not necessarily the best paths, may be your daily life. As we are moving away from tactical to strategic thinking - we need to think about the long-term results of our choices and look more broadly at the whole process. We need to analyze the goals we want to achieve, so that with our decisions we get closer to them.
As developers, oftentimes we focus on choosing the latest technologies and tools. As leaders, we select these factors in a way that will assure that the knowledge in the team is sufficient to deliver the project. Proposed solutions are, first and foremost, supposed to meet customer expectations, not satisfy the egos of our colleagues. On the other hand, lack of experimentation creates stagnation and causes people to leave the team. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers here.
A leader has to constantly think about the cost of his own decisions and evaluate whether it is better to take a larger unit expense or spread it out over time. It is possible that the payoff from our decision will be seen only after a certain period of time, and one must arm oneself with arguments to be able to defend such a change from outsiders.
