Mastering Leadership: The Essential Shift from Tech Expert to Team Catalyst

Are you a technical expert who has been asked to step into a project and people leadership role, and for whom people leadership will be a first? Such a transition can be both exhilarating and intimidating. What skills should you prioritize in leading diverse teams through often complex projects? How can you lead others, deliver results, and learn quickly in today's fast-paced, resource-limited environments? These are common concerns for a technical expert taking this step into new territory. This article serves as a guide to highlight a few key points.

Get ready to discover:

1. The Essential Conditions for Team Success: We'll delve into the must-have relational and structure skills that set successful teams and their leaders apart.
2. Why We Have Bad Managers: We’ll touch on why good technical people can make bad managers.
3. Key Skills for Leaders Today: Explore emerging trends like relationship building, global mindset development, learning, and prioritizing well-being to stay ahead of the curve.
4. Practical Examples of Time-Efficient Leadership Development: See two examples of how organizations can enable meaningful learning, whilst accomplishing real work.

​Let's explore.

The Essential Conditions for Team Success
Modern workplaces often rely on teams for everything, even when a team is not necessary. Research shows that smaller, focused teams with clear roles are proven to be more effective than unwieldy teams with undefined goals. But team success goes beyond structure. A few key factors make a big difference to a team’s and a team leader’s success.
 
Key factors:

• Team Composition: Invest in finding high-performing individuals ("A-players") with diverse skills and perspectives. Don't underestimate the power of those who excel in unexpected roles. For example, a non-technical communications person from a critical stakeholder demography you are trying to serve could provide insights to help you better understand and meet their needs.
• Team Interaction: Positive relationships are crucial. Encourage open communication, mutual respect and appreciation, and vulnerability. Equally important is having a "Devil's Advocate" to challenge ideas, seek out blind spots, and prevent groupthink. Encourage a work culture that allows honest sharing, even if what is shared might be unpopular, perhaps because it creates more work.
• Team Leadership: Leaders should focus on creating a safe, supportive environment with a clear sense of purpose. Clear goals and priorities, agreed on ways of working together, fast feedback cycles, and communicating with internal and external partners, help a team focus on completing the right tasks. Motivate by highlighting the positive impact your team's work creates and celebrating progress toward important goals and outcomes.

 
Why We Have Bad Managers
In the 1960s, Dr. Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian education scholar, coined the term “Peter Principle.” He observed that, “in any hierarchy an employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” In short, a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills - until their performance drops as they do not have the required skills for the new role. In fact, this concept is something we commiserate over when it comes to bad bosses. How does this management concept hold up today? 
 
Kelly Shue, a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, recently decided to test the Peter Principle empirically with large data sets. The study findings were summarized in The Quarterly Journal of Economics — called “Promotions and the Peter Principle,” co-authored with Alan Benson and Danielle Li.
 
Her findings highlight little-considered, yet important, insights for functional experts contemplating transitioning into a management role.
 
Technical Strength Does Not Prepare You to Be a Good People Leader
Your technical strengths and high intelligence are not the basis for successfully managing the complexities of people, work contexts, and productivity. Managing is not the same as doing. Shue’s study found that a person’s ability to collaborate with others was the main driver of the value a manager brings to a team’s performance.
 
Often an individual contributor’s high job performance is used in business as a trigger for promotion. The evidence shows that it is not top performers who make better managers, it is those with lower individual contributor performance metrics prior to their manager promotion. Why? They can facilitate greater value-add through their ability to effectively collaborate. Assessing your ability to work through and with people to effect results is an important step to complete before assuming a people role.
 
Ask Yourself Why You Want to Become a Manager
Do you really want to manage people, or is a manager title the only way to grow in your career and pay?
 
As an individual, if your “manager promotion why” is born of this career pathway limitation you may be setting yourself up for reduced performance, life satisfaction, and well-being. Your job will change from one of focusing on your technical mastery to being in meetings, managing politics, delivering your own projects, and being accountable for others’ performance. If your honest answer to the "why" question is indeed due to a non-technical career promotion track then start exploring if there are alternative ways for you to assume more seniority within your organization as a technical leader.
 
Key Skills for Leaders Today
Relational Skills Mastery: Acknowledging the vital role of technical expertise, it's also imperative to refine relational and social skills such as communication, team collaboration, and emotional intelligence to strengthen adaptive leadership in uncertain times. This skillset also reduces burnout risk.
Invest in specialized training and coaching to unlock learnings in motivating, influencing, and cultivating high-performing teams.
Personalized Learning Journeys: Keep in mind, a one-size-fits-all approach falls short. Embrace personalized learning through self-assessments, coaching, and microlearning tailored to your unique strengths and goals. Attend industry conferences, explore new knowledge domains, and actively seek opportunities for personal and professional growth.
Experiential Learning: Gain practical experience and enhance confidence through hands-on learning. Immerse yourself in simulated projects, hackathons, and real-world challenges to skillfully prepare for the intricacies of leading initiatives.
Global Mindset Cultivation: Foster a global perspective. Nurture intercultural understanding and communication skills to lead diverse teams and navigate the international landscape with grace.
Prioritizing Well-being: Remember, a thriving leader is a productive leader. Integrate stress management, time management, and work-life balance strategies into your leadership development plan. These skills are not only good for you, but they are also good for your team and organization at both a human- and positive business outcomes level. Healthy boundaries are good for families too.

Practical Examples of Time-Efficient Leadership Development
Example 1: Fostering Synergy Through Peer Learning
Challenge:
Over-stretched senior leaders from diverse backgrounds and organizations often feel siloed, alone, lacking in timely learning resources for individual development, and are unable to explore best practices as it relates to their daily dilemmas.

Solution:
Organizations can offer a facilitated Leadership Community of Practice (CoP), bringing together senior leaders for quarterly virtual and hybrid meetings. This approach creates personalized development experiences that flex and adapt to leaders’ needs, meeting them during the critical moments that truly impact their real-life leadership. The ongoing peer community allows leaders to sustain and accelerate their development experiences and learn about other business functions, to boot.

The format blends:

• Real-life challenge discussions: Leaders share current obstacles and collaboratively brainstorm solutions, leveraging diverse perspectives.
• Peer coaching and mentoring: Leaders guide each other with varying functional and business expertise, facilitating growth and knowledge transfer in a safe space.
• Joint learning initiatives: Identify common knowledge gaps and conduct short, facilitated learning sessions (e.g., online courses, guest speakers) addressing those needs.

Expected benefits:

• Improved leadership practices through collective wisdom and peer support.
• Enhanced cross-functional collaboration due to shared understanding and trust.
• Reduced reliance on centralized training, maximizing resource efficiency.

Example 2: Hands-on Team Leadership Labs
Challenge:
An under-resourced business needs its technical and science leaders to take on implementation of strategic projects critical to the organization’s effectiveness and resilience. This results in additional workload, and can be perceived as a big stretch of already thin capacity. Formal training options are limited, while there is little- to -no time or budget to attend project leadership training.

Solution:
Curate simply-designed quarterly career and leadership development labs for these new project team leaders to:

• Work on the new projects: Small teams tackle their real-life projects as a learning cohort. They apply new project management and leadership skills learned during the lab. Their senior managers help scope, guide, provide check points, and support their success throughout the project. They also report progress to colleagues in all-staff and group meetings, modeling new leadership accomplishments, helping staff see that the business is being accountable for implementation of a strategic plan.
• Receive expert facilitation: A facilitator guides the teams through consistent project start-up and ongoing project leadership phases and processes, providing group coaching, tools, templates, and individual feedback tailored to their specific challenges.
• Asynchronous learning and discussion: Between labs, participants engage in online forums and discussions for peer support and continued learning to keep real work progress moving forward.

Expected benefits:

• Accelerated development of practical project management and leadership skills, resulting in career enrichment and growth.
• Increased team cohesiveness and collaboration through shared learning experiences.
• Enhanced project success due to effective application of new skills and insights.

By leveraging peer learning, practical application, and ongoing support, these leadership development models can be adapted to resource-constrained environments to empower over-extended businesses and individuals. They also cultivate highly skilled and collaborative leaders thereby bringing immediate skill and knowledge transfer to the workplace, while achieving concrete and real business results, at little to no cost.

To Sum Up:

1. Higher performing teams are those that have an intentional mix of team members, are small, have clear goals and a collaborative, open, honest work style.
2. One reason businesses end up with bad managers is because, often, high performing technical or other experts are promoted into roles where unproven collaboration, rather than technical skills, drive team success.
3. Today, the leadership skills that are most useful are relational, global mindset, adaptive learning, and wellbeing.
4. Finally, whilst most leaders do not have the luxury of attending training or practicing leadership before an assignment or promotion, leadership learning opportunities can be integrated into the work of leading projects.

At www.thewindhorsejourney.com our development mission is to explore, develop, and thrive. We create safe spaces for learning, support individual growth, and ultimately contribute to organizational success.

P.S. Share this valuable resource with your network of fellow technical professionals who aspire to enhance their leadership. Together, we can explore, develop, and thrive!
 
Thank you for reading!

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Resources:
Blog: 4 Secrets Of High-Performing Teams, Eric Barker, https://bakadesuyo.com/2024/02/teams/
 
Podcast: Why Are There So Many Bad Bosses? Freakonomics, 2023  https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-are-there-so-many-bad-bosses-replay/
 
Articles
5 Common Traps Newly-Minted Managers Need to Avoid,  Firas Kittaneh, November 21, 2018
 https://www.inc.com/firas-kittaneh/5-common-traps-newly-minted-managers-need-to-avoid.html,
 
The Case for Inefficiency: Taking Aim at the “Player-Coach” Model, Leadership Research Institute, 2025
https://www.lri.com/resources/useletter/case-inefficiency/
 
Pieces of Advice for First-Time Managers, Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar
June 02, 2022
https://hbr.org/search?term=rakshitha%20arni%20ravishankar