Top 5 challenges of budding technical leaders

Yesterday I conducted 13^th workshop on “Becoming a successful technical leader”. During the feedback time, one participant commented, “Such sessions happen once in four years”. Well, it wasn’t anything like what you guessed. He was referring to the fact that it was 29^th Feb which comes only once in 4 years!

Jokes apart, it has been fun talking/discussing/presenting to these budding technical leaders (over 250 by now) from 15 organizations. I am presenting here the top 5 challenges of these budding technical leaders (what they feel are the hurdles in becoming a successful technical leader).

1. No opportunity: One common crib is that they don’t see much opportunity for doing cool stuff. Most of the work is routine (enhancement, bug-fixing). As an entrepreneur, this is a difficult one to agree upon for me. May be I am too used to finding opportunity in everything! We discuss various issues associated with product quality of a technology product and how technical leaders can contribute in improving it. For example, owning parameters like availability (uptime), maintainability, performance, security, testability, usability can make so much difference to the product.

2. No time: When someone says “no time”, usually it is a good time to check “Do you really love this activity?” Not everybody should become a technical leader. Perhaps you are destined to succeed somewhere else.

3. No incentive: Well, this is an interesting one. Sometimes we have participants say, “I get my raise anyway. Why should I do all this?” This is really a good one and quite true as well. Engineers from IT industry in India have been getting a raise anywhere between 15% to 30% for past several years (a decade?).

4. No mentors: Now, we come to the serious ones (at least in my opinion). Lack of mentors. This is a real challenge. Many organizations don’t have senior technical specialists and hence budding leaders don’t have anyone to go to. Perhaps, it is time people look for mentors beyond organizational boundary or within organizational boundary but beyond geographical boundary.

5. No role models: Role models play a key role in motivating people and these are in serious short supply as far as technical leadership is concerned. This is also a place where organizations have a key role to play. They should bring out role models and market them within the organization (I am tempted to say even “outside” the organization, but in today’s world of – war of talent – I know how silly it might look).