5 Tips on How to Be a Good Team Leader in IT
If you want to grow your IT career, you have to learn how to lead and manage people. It's not always easy, but it can lead to a better job and a higher salary. Here are several tips to
Being a good team leader involves more than just telling people what to do. You need to know how to communicate, how to delegate, how to listen, and how to be empathetic.
Do you have the characteristics of a leader? Today, we're going to discover how to be a good team leader and what to do when challenges arise.
How to Be a Good Team Leader
If you're a first-time team leader or you've been leading a team for a while, being a good leader requires constant improvement. If you've been leading for quite some time, take the lessons you've learned into account.
If you're just starting off and want to grow your IT career, learning how to lead pushes you in the right direction. Here are 5 tips to improve your leadership skills!
Know Your Team
One of the best things you can do as a team leader is get to know your team. Leaders that are unaware of their team players strengths and weaknesses run into many problems. If you know your team, you anticipate struggles and successes well.
Listening and watching are great skills to have as they help you understand your team better. The more you get to know them, the more trust you'll build, allowing your team to hold a greater respect for you.
Communication
Listening is just a part of communication. Knowing how to speak with your team in a way they understand and hear you is the other part. Most leaders fail if they fail to communicate in an effective way.
Team leaders are responsible for communicating the teams' specific duties. This way it's clear what is expected of everyone and what they are responsible for. Leaders do a great job of explaining projects and gently guiding those back that are off track.
Lead First
Have you ever had a leader that likes to tell you what you should do, but doesn't follow any of those rules themselves? Your team won't trust you if you don't lead by example. It's hypocritical to expect your team to behave a certain way when you don't adhere to those same guidelines.
Reward and Reprimand
Recognize your team and reward them for good work that they do. If they mess up or make a mistake, correct the mistake and address how they can learn from it. With leadership like this, you'll have a team that knows when mistakes are made, it is turned into a positive learning experience.
Delegate Tasks
As a team leader, one of the worst things you could do is be a bottleneck. If you trusted people enough to hire them onto your team, let them do their job. Don't let their projects sit on your desk for days needing approval.
Give them projects to do, and give them guidelines on when it's appropriate to check in with you.
Lead and They Will Follow
Now that you have some actionable steps on how to be a good team leader, understand that it will come with time and practice. You'll make mistakes. Learn from them and allow yourself to grow.
If you're interested in other ways to improve your IT team, read this article today
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