Considering team leads
You don't have to go it alone
This week we’re going to discuss one of the awkward transitional stages in the growth of a support organization. When your team is big enough that it’s becoming unwieldy, but not big enough to need multiple managers, it can be difficult to know how to proceed. Do you just deal with the additional managerial burden of having too many direct reports, with the hopes that soon the team will grow enough that you can hire another manager? Do you hire another manager before you quite need one yet, and then end up with a top-heavy organization? Or do you look at your employees and select one to advance into a team lead position?
This last approach has a lot to recommend it: you’ll be promoting from within so there’s a much smaller learning curve, you won’t have to bring on entirely new headcount, and you’ll remove a significant source of overwork from your own plate. So this week let’s discuss team leads, why they can be a great addition to the support organization, and how to choose a good one.
Responsibility without authority? No
In some organizations, team leads are really nothing more than a convenient designation, a figurehead to represent the rest of their team. They’re a point of contact to help relay information up and down the chain, but have no actual authority over their team. Let me emphasize up front: that’s not the kind of team lead I’m talking about here. In a customer engineering organization, a team lead must be able to operate with a certain level of autonomy, which implies some authority as well. Think about the situations a support team lead is expected to handle:
A team lead is in more regular communication with their team members than you are, which lets them have more effective 1:1s, coach their team on issue handling and customer communications, and serve as a sounding board or second pair of eyes on complex or sensitive customer issues.
If your support is more than ‘business hours, one time zone’, you’re going to need to have some geographical distribution of your support organization. As a support leader, you will therefore have team members who aren’t in the same time zone as you, perhaps significantly so. A team lead for a different region in the support team will be ideally positioned to handle urgent operational issues, such as ticket escalations, that might otherwise have to wait several hours (or even the next day) for you to address personally.
Taking the above point even further, a 24/7 or otherwise international support team is almost certainly going to be globally distributed. One support team I led had a semiautonomous EU-based support team, to cover morning EU hours. Because they had only 3-4 working hours overlap with me (US east coast), I had to rely on my EU team lead to take on most of the managerial burden of their small team. Hiring, 1:1s, support quality oversight, and issue escalation were all on the team lead’s shoulders—hardly a figurehead! As such, I took great care in hiring for this role, knowing they’d have to be a team manager in all but name. And if the team had grown sufficiently to require a formal manager, that team lead would have been ready to step in on day one.
Good and bad team leads
If you have an effective team lead, things will go more smoothly throughout the support organization.
You’ll be able to clear some meetings from your schedule by letting the team lead handle regular 1:1s
The team lead will monitor their team’s support issues, stepping in where necessary to ensure issues are moving forward, not getting stale, and so on
Minor interpersonal issues will come to the team lead’s attention swiftly, permitting early intervention before they blow up into major issues
You’ll be able to rely on the team lead as a trusted deputy, especially if you’re away from work or called into urgent leadership situations
Once the team has grown sufficiently to require multiple full managers, you’ll have a strong candidate already trained and ready to go
On the other hand, choosing the wrong person as a team lead will just bring more headaches down the road. All of the pluses I mentioned just above will be nullified or, even worse, reversed entirely. In addition to that…
A bad team lead may conceal issues on their team from you, or even lie outright, to make themselves look better
Their team members, and the rest of the team, will swiftly lose confidence in this team leader, exacerbating any problems they’re already having with their teams
Worse, the team may lose faith in you as a leader, wondering why you chose this person as a team lead. In extreme circumstances, you could lose other good employees over this
In each of these cases, you’ll end up with a separate mess to clean up after you inevitably have to step in and take their team over directly again
Clearly, the choice of a team lead is not one to take lightly.
Spotting talent
So now that we’re aware of the benefits of a good team lead, and the consequences of a poorly chosen one, how do you go about selecting a good candidate from your existing roster? Well, let’s start with the obvious: if anyone on your team has managerial or team lead experience already, that’s a pretty strong signal that you should speak with them to see if they’re interested in taking on a team lead role again. But if you don’t have anyone like that, or if they have zero interest in returning to a role with any level of managerial responsibility, don’t panic. The next group you should talk to are people on the team who’ve expressed interest in leadership, or in developing their own skills for a future leadership position. They would jump at the opportunity to try a team lead role, as it is a perfect stepping stone for a formal leadership position down the road.
But whoever you think might be a good candidate, don’t just take their interest (or even their past experience) as sufficient. You probably already have seen them in action, but make a point of speaking to them directly, and speaking to their coworkers, to develop a clear picture of:
Have they taken on informal leadership tasks such as mentoring new team members or offering to assist with tricky issues? This is a fruitful place to start because it is a good indicator of how they’d perform those tasks as a team lead. Someone who takes every opportunity to assist others, to make sure team projects go smoothly, and to lend a hand when coworkers are swamped, will likely do the same as a team lead where that is part of their official job. On the other hand, if they haven’t taken the initiative to do any of these things, it may be a sign that they’re not ready for the additional responsibility. At the very least, you won’t have a track record to know how they’ll handle this aspect of the role.
How well do they work with the rest of the team? If the candidate’s coworkers find them hard to work with, or are reluctant to go to them with questions or requests for assistance, that’s not likely to change after they become a team lead. Considering how much of a team lead’s job is working with their team, this would be a large handicap to their effectiveness.
How would their coworkers feel to have them as a team lead? Make a point of asking this of everyone who’d be on the candidate’s team—if you have a good relationship with your employees, you should be able to solicit honest feedback on this point. If some team members have reservations, it’s not necessarily a disqualification for the candidate, but it is a sign to take those concerns seriously and dig deeper.
When your team is growing and you’re finding yourself spending more and more time on people management, it may seem like a bad time to step back and go through a rigorous process to select one or more team leads. But it’s worth it—a good team lead will take a lot of work off your plate, help their teams excel without having to involve you at every stage, and serve as a second pair of eyes and hands to keep the overall team functioning smoothly. Just be sure you choose carefully when selecting a team lead from within the team!
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