I just recently came across a post by Roy Osherove [via DotNetKicks] where he discusses a presentation he gave that evolved into Tips for a successful team lead.

Honestly, I agree with every single point he makes. Here are a few I want to call out though:

1. Daily meetings - I was on a team several years ago that was quite dysfunctional. Nobody knew what anyone else was doing and fingers were being pointed every-which-way-buy-loose. We started having daily stand-ups [a short meeting where you don't sit down which means no one gets comfortable enough to drag it out longer than 10-15 minutes] and within a few weeks the team was working much better together. This is a great way for everyone to stay in synch and for the lead to keep his/her finger on the pulse of the workload.
   * Note: Often people associate this only with AGILE development, but this can be beneficial in all team environments. The team I reference above wasn't even a team of devs, it was an Ops team of SEs.
2. 40 hour weeks - I've only had one manager in the past 8 years that didn't follow this rule and it sucked. His attitude was "do whatever it takes, I don't care" and everyone on the team was unhappy. Work/life balance can be a very ambiguous issue. Like trying to hit a moving target since everyone's definition and expectations are different, but keeping your employee's hours to 40/week is one way that a lead can have a very positive influence.
3. Lots of automation - 'Nuf said.

In addition to Roy's list:

1. Best practices - For developers it would be coding standards, naming conventions and the like. But other types of teams can also benefit by establishing best practices for their own types of work. For example, when I was in Operations writing several scripts using VBScript and the Command shell it would have been nice for us to have had similar best practices across our teams, or heck, even just in my team.

~tod

tags: management