First of all let me say that I love my job as a Team Lead.
I love the fact that I’m trusted by Dayshape to lead people and help them build their careers, deliver results for customers and the company, and to be part of people’s professional lives.
I get to meet so many different people, help them navigate career paths, deal with new situations, constantly learn about how people work, and actually… get paid to speak to folks. Dayshape value Team Leads and we are given the time to invest in our teams – this doesn’t happen everywhere and I believe it’s a real differentiator of Dayshape.
However, there are a few myths I’d like to bust when it comes to the role of a Team Lead.
Who are Team Leads?
Let’s set the record straight.
Team Leads are:
- People who care about people
- Passionate about helping others in their careers
- Employees – just like our team members, and
- Human – just like our team members.
That said, Team Leads are not a whole bunch of things, including:
- The holder of a magic wand who can solve all problems
- A never-ending source of patience with the ability to deal with everything that’s thrown at us, and
- Always happy and positive – although we try our best to be!
We are people continuing to build our own careers and often leading a team is part of our role but we also wear other hats in the company.
Continuous development is a big part of it
We need to continually train to be a Team Lead – the team dynamics change as teams expand and people develop and grow. The employee landscape changes regularly in a scale-up tech company and we need to adjust with that. It’s exciting but it’s also tiring! We need to flex our style from one meeting to the next to meet the needs of our team members/customers/colleagues. We need to treat everyone as an individual, while being fair and consistent across the board. We need to stay up-to-date with diversity, inclusion, and equality. We need to know where to find employee resources. And the list goes on…
But we’re also employees and sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming for us too. The woes that you have are probably very similar to the woes we take to our own manager. And often, we’re caught in the middle, trying our best to be available for our team while meeting the requests of our own manager. Despite appearances, we don’t yet have it all figured out, we’re still growing in our own right.
Leaders need support too
It become clear to me that when you’re busy leading your own team and doing your regular day job, it’s easy to overlook the fact that you might need a bit of support too. That’s why I created roundtables for Team Leads a few months ago, to form supportive environments and a sense of community between Team Leads at Dayshape. The roundtables provide opportunities to build relationships, offer sounding boards for difficult situations, and ultimately support and learn from one another.
In addition, the company recently organized an offsite for all 25 Team Leads at Edinburgh Zoo – a more formal opportunity to collaborate and upskill to become better leaders. With roughly 20% of the company with team lead responsibilities at Dayshape, that’s a sizeable chunk of people who definitely deserve their own community!
Shout-out to my fellow Team Leads, I’d like to recognize and thank them for taking on a people role and let them know that there is support out there amongst your peers. And to those who are not Team Leads, try to remember the multiple hats your Team Lead switches between on a regular day – we’re all human after all.
Spotted: Two of our Team Leads monkeying around at Edinburgh Zoo.
