I've become the de facto team and technical lead, although management has never formally appointed me to the role. I have several years of experience and feel capable of keeping priorities clear, coordinating incidents, supporting the team, and maintaining a healthy product. Our day-to-day work is generally stable, but I receive very little guidance or meaningful feedback from senior leadership. My manager says I'm doing a great job, yet I'm unsure whether I'm actually improving the team or merely preserving the status quo established by the previous lead.
I'd like to become better at handling emergencies, improving processes sustainably, communicating assertively, deciding when change is necessary, empowering people, delegating, and knowing when to take authority versus when to step back. Are there useful courses, books, or practical approaches for developing these leadership skills?
5 Answers
The most important missing piece may not be a course; it may be a clear definition of success. Ask your manager for a dedicated conversation about priorities, decision-making authority, and what good team leadership looks like over the next few months. “You’re doing great” is encouraging, but questions such as “What should I start, stop, or continue doing?” and “What outcomes would show that the team is improving?” produce more useful feedback. If senior mentorship is unavailable, seek perspective from experienced leaders or peers elsewhere in the organization.
Trust the people before you trust the process. Learn how each teammate works, understand their strengths and constraints, and adapt your support without treating flexibility as favoritism. Delegate outcomes, not just tasks, and give people enough context and authority to make decisions. During emergencies, establish clear ownership, keep communication calm and factual, and follow up afterward with a blameless review and specific improvements. You don’t need to project authority constantly; consistency, clarity, and follow-through usually create more credibility than acting forceful.
Keeping things running smoothly is valuable, but invisible work is easy for leadership to overlook. Track meaningful outcomes rather than every tiny task: incidents you coordinated, recurring problems eliminated, improvements delivered, and risks reduced. Share those results through concise updates, demos, or metrics. You can also look at support requests, workarounds, and recurring pain points to find small process changes that will have a real effect. Don’t wait for a crisis to prove your value, but make sure the work you do is visible without taking credit away from the team.
Books and training can provide useful frameworks, but leadership develops through repeated practice and reflection rather than a short course. Topics such as difficult conversations, accountability, time management, staff-level engineering, and coaching are especially relevant. Make small process experiments, define what improvement would look like, and review the results with the team instead of trying to redesign everything at once.
Your role is no longer to personally solve every problem. It’s to help the team become capable of solving problems without depending on you. In one-on-ones, incident reviews, and code discussions, try asking questions that lead people toward solutions instead of immediately giving the technically correct answer. It can feel slower at first, but it scales much better. Also, if your manager consistently says you’re doing well, consider that you may be judging yourself against a much higher standard than anyone else is.
That’s something I need to improve. I tend to give the most accurate answer I can, but I see how that can prevent other people from building confidence and ownership.
I already try to redirect praise toward the people who did the work, so finding a way to communicate the team’s impact without making it about me is probably the balance I need.