Team Leads: No one has the full plan at the start.
You, too, can lead a team without knowing the way.
When I first became a team lead, I received coaching, a clear goal, and a framework that made the project work pretty straightforward to define for the next few quarters. It was a great way to get my bearings on the role, and I learned a lot in a relatively low-risk environment. The hardest parts of the role were the core skills: stakeholder management, negotiation, and prioritization. The technical challenges of the role were challenges I knew how to sort out.
After a while, I was told my team lead role would be expanded. I was excited, but then there had been a miscommunication. I originally understood that I’d be continuing to build upon the work I’d already been doing, with the help of a coworker in Munich who I highly respected and enjoyed working with. Then the email went out announcing that role to the coworker in Munich instead, and I felt blindsided. I reached out to my manager and his peer manager, and I was able to piece together where the communication breakdown might have happened. I was actually being given a slightly larger role, and I think at the time it surprised them that my reaction was panic rather than excitement. I panicked because I had no plan for that expanded role. I’d spent all my energy preparing for the role that went to someone else. Now I had folks congratulating me over chat and email while I held a blank plan. I was a team lead who had… no planned work for her team. It did not feel good.
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