Building Strong Development Teams: Team Lead Training (Part 1) 

At our company, we truly believe that our best assets are the colleagues around us – the teams, as well as the individual consultants. We encourage our teammates to always leverage the experience of their colleagues.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that as a company, we take great pride in our development teams.

If you remember last year’s recap in Numbers, one of the fascinating statistics we came across was that in 2022, we trained 51 consultants during 6 sessions of our High-Performance Teams training. A total of 178.5 hours were invested in this piece of collective knowledge, which our consultants today continuously spread and implement when working with their teammates.

As we approach the end of the year, we look back on the goals we had set and whether we’ve managed to meet them. This year, the focus has been on building even stronger development teams – so we can shine where we deliver best.

Besides the numerous knowledge-sharing forums we continued in a similar spirit as last year, we also added two training workshops that emphasize the importance of collaboration in a team. Depending on their role and interests, our team members had the opportunity to go through Team Lead training and Agile methodology training.

The combination of learning about Agile methodology and going through Team Lead training has helped us make our teams more flexible and learn to collaborate better. This will inevitably lead to improved project outcomes for our clients.

Why Team Lead Training

The motivation behind introducing Team Lead training sessions was that not everyone is “a natural” in this type of role. When new teammates join, they aren’t always familiar with the “our company way” of doing things – so this training is meant to serve as a guideline. We prioritized everyone who is already a Team Lead, and we included potential Team Leads. Additionally, we included those who may never lead a team, but can still benefit from learning about the expectations when working in a team.

The need for Team Lead training came up 2 years ago. Before that, at our company, we used to have leadership training. Leadership training would convey the general idea about leadership: dealing with issues, different characters in a team, taking responsibility, helping teammates, and teaching an approach to management that aligns with our company’s flat hierarchy. Trying to stay in touch with the trends in the IT industry and looking at Agile methodology, we realized that our internal training needed to regroup as well. Each team needs one person to lead it and to take care of communication with the world outside the team, thus helping the team reach their goal.

That is how we created our Team Lead training. The training covers the most important aspects of leadership, and further dives deeper into leading a team within a project.

To create the Team Lead training, we defined and took what was good about our leadership training sessions, then added what was missing and would be more specific to the Team Lead role.

The Training

The training starts with a definition of a Team Lead – but we try to add meaning to this definition by what it means to everyone following the training. We do this by creating a gradual picture of the worst to the best leads our trainees can imagine.

One of the first things we do is try to demonstrate the effect different character types can have in a team. We start off with a Disc Personality Test. According to this test, there are 4 personality types. Knowing the personality type of your teammates is important so that everyone can see each other more clearly. This is followed by remembering and describing a situation where everyone has worked with someone from the opposite end. The introductory part of the training also covers high-performance team phases, the testing and development onboarding, and explains the roles within a team.

In continuation, we try explaining the product development processes. This includes the stages from pre-sales through sales, to resolution (delivery of the service). We have a systematized way of overseeing all the processes in all our projects, and we have a dedicated team member who tends to this (Delivery Teams Life-Cycle Manager). In this part of the training, we define setting up a project – the tools we use, how and where we communicate, and everything relevant to the project.

Throughout the duration of the training, we cover more case studies and go through best practices for every scenario related to the mentioned team roles. There is a dedicated practical part of the training where we deal with real-life situations and address how each trainee would handle them.

Conclusion
Our Team Lead training was created by following a best practices list that our team has developed over years of experience. At our company, we truly believe that our best assets are the colleagues around us – the teams, as well as the individual consultants. We encourage our teammates to always leverage the experience of their colleagues.

We held the Team Lead training sessions on Saturdays so that we could have 8 hours of full undivided attention from our trainees. In total, we had 2 of these training sessions, with approximately 10 teammates per session. We believe that this goes to show both our and our team’s dedication to holding ourselves to the highest possible standards when it comes to delivering quality.

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