Teamwork - Do you practice Servant Leadership?

As a developer, progressing from junior to mid/senior is simple: just get better at what you already do! But when you're making the jump to leadership roles, things aren't quite so clear cut.

Being a great developer doesn't intrinsically make someone a great leader. It's a different set of skills, and the requirements can seem counterintuitive (or even backward) to what got you there in the first place.

So how do you move from a hero engineer to a force multiplier of an entire team?

Figure: Stop being the hero. Start building a dream team

Good leadership in the context of leading a development team is less about authority and more about creating the conditions where engineers can do their best work consistently. It blends technical credibility, people leadership, and systems thinking.

What is Servant Leadership?

In dev teams, leadership is often inverted.

A strong leader:

• Works for the team, not the other way around
• Shields the team from unnecessary external pressure
• Translates business goals into technical clarity

Your success metric is no longer personal output, it’s team output and sustainability.

Lead the team, not the project

One of the most difficult transitions to make is shifting away from a focus on the project itself, and putting your energy toward the team. The longer you've been working on a product, the harder it is.

One of the biggest challenges is accepting that others won't be able to build as fast, debug as efficiently, or design as proficiently as you can. Your job now becomes guiding your team through becoming that good - not to do it for them.

The most valuable questions in your arsenal are:

• What can I do to help you?
• What's slowing you down right now?
• Where are you feeling out of your depth?

Macro, not micro

It's very easy to fall into the trap of micromanaging every feature, bug, or decision point. You have the knowledge, and the skills, to solve these problems. But by doing so, you aren't uplifting your team. You're just lifting.

Bad leadership looks like:

❌ Figure: Bad example - Dictating how something should be done

In the short term, this will ship features. But the long-term damage is compounding. You will:

• Make the team reliant on you to define “this way” for anything and everything
• Rob your team of opportunities to learn and problem-solve
• Bottleneck the project around your available hours

Good leadership looks like:

✅ Figure: Good example - Allow the team to problem-solve

This approach will take longer in the short-term. You already have the answers, and could ship this feature faster yourself. But that's not the point. Your job is to give your team the opportunities to learn the same skills (and earn the same battle scars) as you.

Psychological safety

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? Everybody.

The culture of high-performing dev teams is where everybody feels comfortable and safe with:

• Admitting mistakes
• Asking “stupid” questions
• Challenging ideas

If you speak to your team from an unassailable position of authority, your team will become paralyzed. No one will add a single line of code until you've personally vetted it.

Mistakes happen. Bugs will appear. People will misunderstand requirements. Production will go down. These are golden opportunities for your team to earn those battle scars.

❌ Don't

• Start blame trains
• Make comments like “I told you so”
• Ask questions like “how do you not know that?”

✅ Do

• Have your team critique ideas
• Encourage dissent
• Acknowledge better/different solutions

Teach ownership

When a problem happens, or a hard decision needs to be made, your team will instinctively look toward you to solve it. While it may be quicker/easier for you to do so, it means your team aren't able to take ownership over that space.

While you can definitely help rescue them if needed, it shouldn't be your first reaction. Give them space and encouragement to step up.

You'll soon find them more autonomous, and more capable. These qualities are exactly what you're here to cultivate.

Should you still code?

The size of the team and the overall development maturity will dictate how much time you have “on the tools”. Generally, this should be low on your list of priorities.

Your daily to-do list should look like:

1. Help unblock the team
2. Be available to answer questions when approached (by the dev team or stakeholders)
3. Refine the backlog
4. Code

Looking at that list, you can see how a small, mature team of developers will allow you more coding time than a larger or less mature team.

Your primary role is to support your team. If there's time left over, then take on coding tasks that you're able to put down again if/when an item higher on the list comes along.