Member-only story
When I first became a lead developer, I really didn’t know what I was doing when it came to management. I avoided making horrible mistakes from sheer luck. I had the space and time to get better, and here’s what I learned about doing it right.
Lead and grow developers, don’t “manage” them.
I think the word manager needs to go away. Management is for problems: crisis management, care management, etc. The entire philosophy and much of the history around management tends to be dehumanizing and exploitative. Unsurprisingly, people don’t like feeling “managed”.
People do like to grow, and people like to be around good leaders. And if people are given the opportunity to grow and work with an excellent leader, they will usually CHOOSE to do what is asked of them. And that’s the whole reason you wanted a “manager” in the first place, right?
What is leadership then?
Leadership doesn’t mean being the “best”. In the beginning I thought that I had to be the biggest and best tech in the room in order to manage. But this isn’t true and it’s impossible to sustain anyway. In a large team you can’t be the best at everything all the time. Your job isn’t to be better than the team, it’s to make the team better than they already are.
