Leading a work team requires practice and skill-building. Here are the 7 abilities that an efficient team leader in software development must have.

Efficient leaders in software development exceed the title of boss or manager. They have found a way to achieve the right combination of curiosity, self-talk, charisma, and self-assurance, probably with a bit of luck and timing.

Some people appear to be natural born leaders with these skills, but the truth is that most leadership traits can be learned and sharpened over time and practice. In order for a team to become efficient, effective, and driven toward success, it is important that your software development company develops programs, trainings, and coaches to help project leaders to achieve the client’s goals.

Given the importance of this, I have decided to mention the 7 skills that every team leader in software development must have.

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1.    Team builder

A team which works together well and happily is a more efficient team since their union can bring out the best in them. Making a team work together requires a keen understanding of people.

It is also highly important that the team leader in software development be able to identify the strengths and what gets them excited to interact with others. Moreover, it is key to listen to their demands for attention, recognition, and feedback in order to ensure the team stays on track.

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Feedback should be proactive and constant. Many leaders are prone to wait until a problem occurs before they give feedback. The best thing to do is have an internal process that states that leaders should give goals and formal feedback every 6 months.

2.    Delegation

Delegating tasks to the right individual is an important management skill for team leaders in the software development industry as it allows them to be focused on the truly important aspects of the project.

Delegation is possible when the leader has a good understanding of each and every team member. In a development team, each member can have different interests; for instance, some can be good in front end tasks, while others prefer back end tasks. Based on the different abilities each person has, the task has to be assigned.

Delegating well increases productivity and confidence within the team. Leaders that are good delegators, that challenge their team with important responsibilities build their commitment, hard work, and satisfaction.

3.    Autonomy

Autonomy is essential to build trust in employee engagement. In an Agile environment, leaders provide the team members with clear goals and let them find the best way to achieve them.

If the leader does not rely on team input, autonomy is not possible. The leader should guide the group through the delivery and allow them to be self-directing. When they feel that their leaders trust them, they are more engaged since they feel in command of their time, effort, and reward.

4.    Motivation

Provide your team with the needed training to advance in their careers and to become knowledgeable about the newest technologies.

This is a good way to maintain motivation in developer teams and can help to keep the team members who are developing their skills while working hard on the delivery assigned.

5.    Coaching

Things can go wrong both on a project and within the team, and in those moments, it is important to avoid getting caught up in the blame game and to try to identify those responsible for the mistakes.

A team leader in software development needs to understand the problems, help the team overcome them, and more importantly, learn from the problem so that it does not happen again. If the problem has to do with an issue with the code, a quality software improvement with unit/integration tests could be a possible solution. On the other hand, if it is about a process issue, it will be necessary to update internal processes.

Leaders that are destructively critical about mistakes destroy employee engagement. Good leaders, instead of punishing mistakes, encourage their people to try again.

6.    Problem solving

As team leaders, the responsibility is to minimize how often problems take place, which means we must be brave enough to solve them right away before things go wrong.

Leaders must have the ability to guide teams through the problem solving process and come up with positive results. They also realize that the team needs to have some guidelines to keep them on track.

7.    Integrity

Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, expectations, and outcomes. It is an important attribute of a great leader to demonstrate commitment to do the right thing for the right reason, regardless of the circumstances, and to make the team members follow him/her in these values and ethical practices.

Integrity makes a leader highly trusted, and leaders who inspire trust obtain better results and loyalty from the working team.

To Sum up

Being a good team leader in software development is not just a matter of having charisma.  It involves a set of skills and attributes that people acquire through experience. Having great leaders will definitely impact your software solution’s result.

Can you add another quality that these leaders must have?

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