Coaching and Influential Leadership

Besides developing software, as a team leader, one of your most important tasks is help develop the team members themselves. I always think there are two missions existing in a software development task. One is complete the software development to meet the organization’s business objective. The other is via a successful software delivery; each team member could gain something to satisfy his/her own development needs. In the long run, we should carefully balance these two kinds of needs; otherwise, the working enthusiasm and team morale may be hurt.

 

Anyway, you are a manager not just because you are so lucky to be appointed to be; more importantly, it’s because you have much longer working experience and much wider and deeper knowledge base. You might have learned your knowledge and gained your current capability by yourself. But be a great manager, you should also pay attention to help your team member shorten their own learning and improvement curve.

 

Coaching is a main activity manager should often use to guide and speed up team member’s improvement. A few years ago, there was a fresh graduate joining in my team. Working with him for a while, I found he lacked some basic programming skill. Each time, when he asked for my help to solve his programming problem, besides pointing out where is problem in his program, I also proactively told him something behind his problem, like what’s polymorphism, what’s benefit we can get from it, even I carefully recommend best books to him to study. After finishing the project, I have a regular one to one talking with that team member. He said he quite appreciated I could give him great help during his most difficult time of programming under big technical pressure for a company for the first time. Since then, I know we have not just completed a project, but also built mutual trust working relation.

 

In addition, through coaching, you can build up your influential leadership. As leader, in order to achieve business objective, sometimes, we must convince team members to follow the way we indicate. In other words, part of manager’s responsibility is giving instruction to team member and hope your instruction could be executed exactly as you expect or even better. To convince staff to follow you, you need some influence. The question is how you can establish your influential leadership. You know, the position of manager is one thing, the real position of your leadership in team members’ heart is another thing. Through coaching, you really help shorten team members’ learning curve and little by little you get team members’ trust. Afterwards, you become a real leader and the team becomes a real team.