Greeting! My name is Ilya Pracht, I am a trainer on TeamLead courses, Senior Product Manager, Delivery Manager and COO at OTUS. And today I want to talk to you about the trial period of teamlead.

Timlid rarely change jobs, but, as they say, aptly. After all, the complexity of the transition and onboarding increases significantly if you are a manager. It is logical. In addition to your own tasks and getting to know the company, you need to learn about your team, learn to work with it, win the leadership and authority of your colleagues, thoroughly understand the project, because you will now be responsible for it. Management’s expectations of team leads are much higher than those of engineers. And to justify them, you have to enter the work directly from the wheels. There is no time for swinging.

How to make this process easier, how to help the team understand the main tricks during the trial period, what are the tips and life hacks in this process – all this I want to analyze in this article. Chased!

Step 1 – Understand the role

First of all, no matter how banal it sounds, you need to decipher for yourself what a team leader is in this particular company. It’s no surprise that the role of team leaders is unique from company to company. Somewhere more people management. Somewhere more technical management. Somewhere you have to write code, sometimes you have to take care of the team and cut it into tasks. This is the proportion that needs to be dealt with.

Essentially, a team lead has 3 main blocks of tasks:

1. Team management

2. Project management

3. Technical tasks

A classic team leader is a playing coach. And in this case, each task gets approximately equally, 30-35%. This is a spherical thymlide in a vacuum. But the percentage of your new company needs to be determined. For what? In order to properly allocate your energy and time, set the right priorities. So that you have exactly what the corporate and engineering culture adopted in the company means.

Step 2 – Understand management expectations

It’s very cool when they just write you goals for the trial period in the offer. And besides, not in the format of true/false, did/didn’t do, but with some other metrics so that you can monitor progress. For example, increase the average velocity of the team by 50%. Or achieve closure of at least 80% of project releases on time. Good, clear, measurable, smart goals. Love to watch and perform!

But this is not always the case. I would even say quite rare. Often goals look something like this: “here’s your team, here’s your project, do it well.” And what to do in this case?

But this is a very important point in onboarding. After all, the management’s expectations of your work are hidden in these goals. And at the end of 3 months, this is where their eyes will be turned, it is these parameters that will decide whether you have passed the probationary period or not. Did well – passed. Didn’t do it – so no.

Hence the conclusion: management expectations should be clarified. Ideally, get an offer with specific goals for a trial period. If it doesn’t work out, get the managers and get these measurable goals from them at the very beginning of the work. So that you have 3 months to achieve them. Well, it’s either time to clearly understand that you are not ready for this, or to adjust your goals, or to change companies. The sooner it all happens, the better. You won’t have time to get used to it.

Step 3 – Understand who is on your team

Timlid is a playing coach. Yes, you can do a lot on your own with your own hands. But everything will not work out. You have a team for this. And these are your main hands. Not even extras, mind you. Because additional ones are your own. This is a pun.

In order to achieve efficiency from the team, it is necessary to correctly distribute tasks and use the correct and individual approach in managing each one. Therefore, you need to clearly understand who is in front of you, what he can do and what he can’t. What he wants and is ready to do, and what he is not.

First of all, an audit should be conducted. I wrote in detail about the audit of the team in this article, I will not go into details and repeat myself. It is important that you clarify the competence, motivation, psychotype of each employee, as well as the general state of the team, its dynamics, role balance.

After the audit, be sure to spend time communicating with the team. Talk 1/1 with each. Find out what kind of people have desires, what problems. What is so interesting that you inherited from the past team leader. No one paints a more complete and true picture for you than your employees. In addition, this is the first important step in the formation of a leader’s authority. Show that you care and are here to make their job better and more comfortable. Employees will appreciate.

After such a communication session, tackle the identified problems. Solve the simplest, but the most painful. About which everyone is talking. When employees see real positive developments after talking to you, your credibility will increase dramatically. And your authority as a leader will strengthen.

And the next step is to deal with conflict resolution. Maybe there are several people who claim the same role (techlid, for example). Help them decide. Or there are a couple of people who hate each other. Try to return them to the construct or reverse the rotation of one of them. In general, resolve all conflicts that prevent the team from working effectively. This is again the most important step in building your authority, as well as a good push to improve the efficiency of the whole team.

Step 4 – Understand your project

The last step, but not least, is to understand your new project. Why am I putting it at the very end? There are two reasons.

The first is that you are a technician. You have dealt with a lot of different projects for the duty of service, which means that it will not be difficult for you to deal with one more. You didn’t just become a team leader.

The second is the very characteristic formation of authority among IT professionals, taking into account professionalism. That is, other developers will respect you if you are a cool developer. Testers – if a cool tester. And so on. So here it is. Building your authority as a leader on this is long and boring. But it is easy and effective to strengthen the authority that is already being formed. Therefore, in my opinion, it is necessary to start with work with the team, with people. Show them that you are a real leader for them. And then secure it with your technical skills. So your leadership in the team will become strong and unbreakable. And you will have someone to lean on.

Resume

As a result, we came up with 4 main steps — what a team leader needs to do when joining a new company:

1. Understand your role – determine who is a team leader in this company.

2. Understand the expectations of the management – determine who and on the basis of what will make the final decision, whether you passed the probationary period or not.

3. Understand who is in your team – determine who you should work with and what opportunities you have.

4. Understand your project – determine what you will work on in the near future.

And each of these points, in one way or another, is important not only from the point of view of onboarding and understanding the environment, but also for building your leadership authority in the team and company, so necessary if you are a new manager.

PS

It turned out quite concisely. Each of these steps can and should be described in more and more detail. To do this, we invite you to the open lesson of the OTUS “TeamLead” course on August 21 on the topic “TeamLead Probationary Period”.

On it, we will explain in detail how to join a new team and become a partner and leader for them, not a “boss”, how to dive into the technology stack and quickly understand it, which aspects should be focused on first. Register and come!

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