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.
Team Leads are:
That said, Team Leads are not a whole bunch of things, including:
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.
We need to continually train to be a Team Lead—the team dynamics change as teams expand and people develop and grow. The employment and company 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.
We're employees too. The woes that you have are probably very similar to the woes we take to our own manager. We don't always agree with the messages we have to deliver. We're not always able to chat when you want to.
That said, we are here to help when we can, we're here to make sure communication is as good as we can make it, we're here to support our teams and the company, to encourage growth and learning, to foster team spirit amongst individuals. We're open to suggestions on how to adapt and we're still growing in our own right. We wear multiple hats throughout the day, we switch context in a split second.
We need support, we need to let off steam to a peer, we need a sounding board for difficult situations. At Dayshape, I initiated Team Lead round tables a few months ago to foster that sense of community between team leads. 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. This initiative is helping to build relationships between Team Leads—a problem shared and all that.
At Dayshape, there are currently 23 people with team lead responsibilities, that's 20% of the company so a notable chunk of people and definitely enough to deserve their own community!
Shout out to my fellow Team Leads, I'd like to recognize and thank them for taking on the responsibility of a people role and let them know that there is support out there amongst your peers. To those who are not Team Leads, try to remember the multiple hats your Team Lead switches between on a regular day.