One of the most challenging roles nowdays is the leader within an IT company and, even worst, within a consulting firm.

It is not even a well-defined role. Some real cases:

• managers and executives must be, first of all, leaders;
• technical leader for an entire area of the company are leaders;
• team leader, it says the title itself;
• project manager, should be able to lead people;

Here a bunch of notes that come from my experience.

Gain the role of leader

This seems simple. But it is not. there are two cases:

• you were assigned a leadership role;
• you reach the role as the outcome of a career path;

It doesn’t matter…there is only one way to be a leader:
Establish your reputation through the competency. Both your bosses and people who report to you should not have doubt about your role.
Anyone can make mistakes, even you: don’t regret to admit your errors and share them with persons you work with. It could seem easy, but did you remember last time that your boss admitted to being wrong?

Motivate your colleagues

It may appear really obvious, while it is not.

• Sometimes you are working on legacy systems, death boring projects, and so on.
• You have to manage people expectations.
• Deadlines are too often very challenging.
• Don’t forget customers! They should be your main focus and business.

You should be able to engage your colleagues, showing passion, transmitting optimism, sharing successes and, why not, failures.
Every member of your team have to feel as part of a success\failure story.
Finger-pointing is simply bad! It doesn’t produce any positive effect, so it is important to organize brief and frequent meetings to clearly analyze what is gone wrong and what it was very ok.

Normalize work peaks and slowdowns

Working in IT company may be really varying.
Some days you are underwater, other days you have almost nothing to do.
A good leader should normalize these varying work loads: you can adopt several techniques to achieve this goal, but I think that there is no silver-bullet, so I will not try to give you a single solution.
You have to keep in mind it: if the work load becomes varying, then you have a syntom that something is going wrong.

Manage your managers

Well…this is tricky.
Your boss has the ability to weaken your leadership. You have to learn how to manage him\her and become a trusty subordinate, but…never, ever, be a lackey!
Don’t forget you are an example for other leaders (even for aspiring ones). Certain behaviours can be very dangerous for a company: the perception of meritocracy will be changed and people will start to think you don’t deserve the role of leader.
One more point: don’t be too polite in communications with your chief. A direct approach is often worthwhile, even if a little more risky.

Filter customers rage

Ok, let’s face it: sometimes the customers can be assholes.
The most important thing in these cases, is to manage him correctly: While the customer should not be your enemy, you have to manage the perception that your team has about him\her.
Don’t demonize him, don’t degrade his value.
If you demonize him: you are creating a strong barrier between team and business. Bad.
If you degrade his value: your team can start to think that they might not worry about the business development.

Delegate responsibilities not tasks

It is very simple and quite common that leaders delegate their own tasks to other colleagues which they manage. Anyway, too often, this is only a balance of workload.
While this may seem normal and wise, the best way to achieve a better collaboration and a succesful task completion is to delegate responsability of task to people you manage.
Sharing responsability is far better than distributing workload: in this way you give more importance to each person in your team and they might feel to work as a team and not as a squad.

People leaving

Another problem to face is the high turnover rate of resources in the IT consulting firms.
“Everybody is useful. Nobody is necessary” is simply a lie. This is an excuse to not admit your own responsibilities.
If you think in this way, you are treating persons as numbers! Your company may grow as number of employees and\or by value that employees give to company’s business. Which way do you think is better?!
Anyone can change job, but anytime it happens you feel a bit frustrated, especially if that person is one you managed, coached, trained or rely on. My best advice is for each leave to analyze the reason and understand what could you have done to avoid it.

Let grew who wants emerge. Manage who just want to relax

There are two kind of people you could manage:

• Who wants to develope their own career;
• Who is simply interested in reaching a comfort zone and remain within;

While the former seems to be easier to manage, you should pay attention to them. Usually, they have expectations, they are ambitious and want to grow at their own pace.
This requires a constant monitoring from manager, because otherwise you can lose them.
The lazy people, in general, are not welcome. My advice is to manage them such as their “comfort zone” becomes useful to your business. Furthermore, it is better to try to frequently challenge them, but with no real expectation…you may feel frustrated by their lack of reactivity. In short, don’t set them aside and never give up.

What is your experience?
Any suggestions?