Managing Multiple Teams

Delegate Complex and Frequent Tasks to Develop Your Team

Tasks like project planning, systems design, or being the key person during an outage are the biggest opportunity you have to grow talent on your team while also making the team run better. Strong managers spend a lot of their time developing members of their teams in these areas. Your goal is to make your teams capable of operating at a high level without much input from you, and that means they’ll need individuals who can take over these complex tasks and run them without you around.

Are your teams learning how to operate independently, or are you keeping them dependent on you for critical functions? List the tasks that you and only you really know how to do for the team. Some of them may be appropriate, like writing performance reviews or making hiring plans, but many of them are important to teach your teams to accomplish themselves. Project management. Onboarding new team members. Working with the product team to break down product roadmap goals into technical deliverables. Production support. These are all skills members of your team need to learn. Teaching them may take time up front, but in the long run it will save you time. Not only that, but teaching your team how to do these things is part of your job. It is your responsibility, as a manager, to build up the talent in your organization, and to help your people learn new skills they’ll need for the next stages of their careers.

Delegation is a process that starts slow but turns into the essential element for career growth. If you teams can’t operate well without you around, you’ll find it hard to be promoted. Develop your talent and push decisions down to that talent so that you can find new and interesting plates to learn how to spin.

Ask the CTO: Warning Signs

I’ve experienced a couple of times now when teams have struggled unexpectedly, and a person has quit without warning. Are there any warning signs I can look out for to catch these issues earlier?

There are definitely signals that you start to notice after you’ve been managing for a while. Here are some I’ve learned to spot:

The person who is usually chatty, happy, and engaged suddenly starts leaving early, coming in late, taking breaks to leave during the workday, staying quiet in meetings, and not hanging out on chat. This person is either having a major personal issue or getting ready to quit. Usually, people will tell someone when there is a personal issue (such as a sick relative, relationship problems, or health issues), but not always. If this happened right after a major adjustment, such as a promotion, a team reorganization, or other event, the person may feel that she was overlooked. Regardless of the reason, you may want to have an honest conversation and try to get to the root of the issue before she resigns.
The tech lead claims that everything is going well, but skips your 1-1s frequently and rarely provides detail in his status updates. This person may be hiding something. Often what he’s hiding is that the progress is going far slower than he anticipated, or he’s building something outside of the scope of the project. Help him create a clear project plan early and set expectations for how to adjust that plan when things change, so that it’s harder for him to hide a lack of progress. Also help him clarify the project’s goals and scope, which can be daunting for some new tech leads. You may have experienced something similar when managing new hires who were in over their heads. This is also related to the person who spends a lot of time advocating for new languages/platforms/processes instead of finishing her work.
The team has absolutely no energy at all in their meetings. In fact, the meetings feel like a total slog, with the product manager and tech lead doing all of the talking while the rest of the team sits silently or speaks only when called upon. A lack of engagement in meetings tends to mean the team isn’t engaged by the work or do not feel like they have a say in the decision-making process.
The team’s project list seems to change every week, depending on the customers’ whims that day. This team hasn’t thought about its goals beyond pleasing customers, and may need better product or business direction.
A small team internally seems very fragmented in understanding; the engineers profess ignorance about systems they don’t work on and lack the curiosity or openness to learn about those systems. This team is more strongly identified by their day-to-day work and the systems they touch than by the larger team or the company. They may be resistant to changing their systems based on the needs of the larger team or the business.