Assuming you're already having frequent 1:1s and less-frequent longer feedback and career-development talks with your team members, it pays to keep a structured overview of everyone's goals, in-flight actions and your thoughts and notes in one place.
Keeping this overview in a structured, shareable format like a wiki page achieves several things:
1) It ensures you keep an overview of the full team - especially in larger teams, it is easy to focus on some remarkable people and lose sight of others.
2) It helps you manage upwards - sharing the overview with your own direct lead makes it easy to keep them in the loop on team development, and allows them to notice and chime in early if development opportunities like new projects arise.
To put this into practice you only need to do three things:
1) Create a page in your favorite tool and add a table to track everything you want to track (see mine below).
(For peak async communication share it with direct lead - and only them! - and send them a notification every time you update something.)
2) Update it every time something new comes up - a reached milestone, relevant notes of a 1:1, a growth opportunity you just heard of, or that showerthought on how to help Alice become a great public speaker.
3) Set aside half an hour every month to reflect on the overview - is there someone you didn't think about in a while, some actions you should follow up on, or some great achievement to keep in mind when it's time for promotions?
The 'team leadership toolkit' is a series of bite-sized articles on techniques I find helpful as a software engineering team lead.
Having shared most of this with peers and mentees in an unstructured way, I've started this to concisely describe the What, Why and How of things that work for me and might be helpful for others.
What about you? What's in your 'leadership toolkit'?
I'd love to hear your comments or posts!
Top comments (1)
Journalling the team's work is important to consolidate issues encountered and hence facilitate better decision making