I was reading a good article the other day in INC magazine by Aaron Skonnard, who is the CEO of Pluralsight, who I have recently started Freelancing for. The article is called How to Build a Kick-Ass Exec Team, and talks about 8 leadership traits company heads / CEOs can use to create a good working culture within their organisations.

The article is aimed at people who run their own companies, but I thought the leadership traits Aaron talks about also apply to other leaders and managers lower in an organisation. From my point of view I am thinking as a Development Manager running a software team in a healthcare organisation.

In this article I want to covers the original 8 leadership traits and say how they apply to managers and leaders of a software team in an organisation, as I feel there is a direct correlation. I recommend reading Aaron’s original article first.

Leaders Help Their Teams

The team I leade, I try to run agile using Scrum. I say, try, because the project I am currently running is part of a larger program of work that is very much waterfall. We are one of the donor projects in a larger agile transformation plan. As part of the running of this team I want to avoid being the guy at the top dishing out orders or even worse, Micro Managing. I believe a team should be self organising in their workload with inputs from the product owners and business who guide our direction. My role is very much about removing barriers and blockers that get in their way so they can concentrate on doing what they do best, developing software. I feel it is much better to be a servant leader as opposed to a more traditional autocratic leader who controls a strict hierarchy whilst leading from the top.

Since writing this article, I have developed a training course for the Pluralsight training library called “Developer to Manager” which is available to all current subscribers.

There comes a time in every developers career when you will have to make a decision about your own progression. Do you stay as a developer / senior developer and focus mostly on code, or do you make a jump into a management level position as a Lead Developer who has to manage staff or a Development Manager.

I had this same choice back in 2011. I was a Senior Developer for a large internet bank. I didn’t directly manage any staff although I was a mentor to a few. I got involved with an academy program where we would offer work placements to university students and train them up for a year. I started on this program as a mentor, but eventually I ended up running the academy as-well as carrying on with my normal role as a senior developer. This was my first proper go at directly managing a team of people, and I really enjoyed it. From there I moved onto my current role (Current for the next 2 weeks of writing as I accepted another job) at a consumer finance company as a Lead Developer. This role still involved some coding (but no where near as much as I was used too) but focused mainly on leading a multi disciplined team of software developers.

It has largely been a good experience for me and I enjoy leading as-well as coding, but it isn’t for everyone. Seeing as I am about to take on a new role as a Development Manager for a new organisation, I thought I would put an article together on making the transition from Developer to Manager based on my experiences. I hope that it will help anyone who is trying to decide whether it is the right career change for them.