Do you find it challenging to lead and a manage a team? If so, I do too.
During my sophomore year of college, I decided to lead various projects and even volunteering teams. I was honestly fed up at times due to poor leadership. As a result, I decided to be a leader who truly cares about everyone’s success as well as the project’s success.
By the time I earned leadership roles in various programming projects inside and outside of school, I felt ready and motivated to lead. However, I will admit that it was not easy. In this article, I will talk about the challenges and lessons that I have learned.
1. Supply resources and help your teammates get started I remember when I was tasked with learning the Ionic Framework, Git/GitHub, TypeScript, Angular, HTML, etc. I was in my very first programming course at the time, and I had to learn all of these technologies outside of class because of a side project. In the end, I did not learn these technologies very well. Nobody else understood these technologies, and most of the time wasn’t even spent on learning them at our meetings. It was mostly just brainstorming. As a result, when I became a leader for a project in one of the organizations I am part of, I decided to supply each member with the same resources I used to learn HTML, CSS, JS, Bootstrap, Node.js, and MongoDB. There was one issue: people were not watching the videos and could not contribute to the project. Therefore, I began hosting workshops to go over the material in the videos to help them get started.
2. Realize when you’re micromanaging Nobody likes to be watched over, especially if you are confident in yourself. Sometimes it can be difficult to get people to contribute to side projects and class projects since it’s not a job. Always have a backup plan if a deadline can’t be reached or someone does not do their assigned task. Make sure the person clearly knows what they have to do and when it should be done, but don’t overstep your boundaries. Offer to help if someone if they are stuck instead of putting even more pressure on them.
3. Be clear about the team’s goals and current tasks Your team’s goals and tasks always change, but you should be clear about all of this. From the start of your project, you all should agree on prototypes of the application. Then, you guys can focus on choosing an appropriate tech stack and delegating tasks. For dividing up tasks, I like to use GitHub’s “Project” tab to host a public todo list for everyone to see and edit. Make sure everyone knows who to reach out to for help and where to access resources. Lastly, don’t forget to give people credit and constructive feedback!
Please comment below if you have any other tips!