You already have tech leadership in technical positions. What happens if you redefine that idea and broaden those roles? What happens if you transform tech leaders into strategic mentors?
While it could be easy to get lost in the semantics of these ideas, today, we want to focus on a perspective shift. The difference between a team leader and a strategic mentor is non-technical. How can you get your leaders to foster growth and development outside of raw coding skills?
That’s what we’re after.
Redefined mentorship in tech teams
Each tech team has a leader. That’s normal.
What does that leadership look like in your organization?
There might be administrative duties. They might take personal responsibility for the outcome of team efforts and project quality. They might even have incentive structures along those lines.
Those are all descriptions of management or administrative roles, but how well do they describe active leadership?
If we think of leadership as the skills and expressions that take the team where you want it to go, then something essential needs to be added to the description above. How does your team leader foster growth and success for the other members?
When you switch the mode of thought like this, you can see how mentorship can redefine your leadership and the teams.
Strategic Thinking and Decision-Making
When considering a tech lead mentor, you will consider technical advice first.
You expect mentors to provide advice along the development route — helping team members to code better and more efficiently.
This leads to strategic thinking and decision-making.
As mentors develop team members, the conversations drift from specific coding advice to a general approach. This translates to strategic thinking and creates a decision-making process that orients from a better position.
Yet, we’re still really talking about expanding on technical advice. From here, we can dip our toes in deeper waters.
Tech team’s development beyond Technical Skills
This is where we get into the value of a mentor-based leadership position. Technical skills development and guidance are valuable, but you can get so much more from a team when you broaden the scope of mentorship.
Real success stems from fostering non-technical skills as well. Mentors can teach company values and explain internal systems. Even better, they can drive the culture you want in your organization.
Do you want more innovation in development? It starts with the mentors. The same can be said for adaptability and higher performance.
In fact, let’s look at each concept in greater detail.
Fostering a culture of innovation
It’s one thing to find an innovator on your team and let them loose. It’s another to foster an entire workplace culture of innovation. Strategic mentors can grant you the latter.
With personal guidance, leaders can create room for innovation within development cycles. The mentor provides a safety net. This allows members more room to fail along the way, and that room for failure is the doorway to more significant innovation.
Adaptability and change management
At this point, you’re building a culture with room for failure. That’s a great start, but you want to avoid creating a cycle of failure. At the end of the day, you still need a working code.
Adaptability mentoring provides the next step.
While team members are trying new things and learning from their efforts, your seasoned leaders can guide the process. You eliminate some of the more obvious points of failure without killing the culture.
This environment naturally becomes more adaptable. Developers get used to trying, failing, adjusting, and succeeding. It makes them more flexible, and the team management process can now easily handle sudden changes.
Building High-Performing teams
You can already see the seeds of success. You have mentors helping individuals with technical and non-technical skills and processes. You’ve built an innovative culture that learns from failures without disrupting development cycles.
You can expect success if you provide the right tool sets to enable and enhance these practices. Those tools offer collaboration resources, administrative assets, security practices, content and technology stacks sharing, and improved coding. While we’ll revisit this concept, you can find all of it in a proper Enterprise Developer Platform (EDP).
Learn how an EDP works right now, watch the video!
You already have the keys to build high-performing teams. All you need from here is to measure success, make adjustments according to your measurements, and empower the teams with the necessary tools.
Let’s talk about measurements first.
Measuring the success of strategic mentorship
To measure success in this regard actively, you must reimagine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). What numbers should you collect or calculate?
Some basic ideas start with engagement metrics. How many hours are spent in mentoring sessions? How many people participate in the program?
Beyond that, you’re looking at the results. How do you measure innovation?
Consider counting the number of failed ideas. You can also quantify their impact on the development cycle. If your team members can fail repeatedly while still hitting goals, then you have a strong innovation culture.
Lastly, and most importantly, you can discuss KPIs with your mentors. Even if they can’t quantify the program’s impact, simply trying to verbalize it can help you find good metrics to track.
But how can an EDP help a Tech leadership’s day-to-day life?
Returning to the concept of EDPs, technology is the final ingredient for success. Give your teams the tools they need, and they can maximize any value you derive from strategic mentoring.
In particular, look for the following from your EDP:
- All in one workspace. Standardization, knowledge sharing and efficiency bundled into a single workspace
- Technical alignment. Focus on tools that help an individual team and fold nicely into company resources. Prioritize tools that integrate well with things you already use and love.
- Developer experience. Focus on tools that enhance the developer experience. That could include automation, sharing technology standards, generative AI, cleaner interfaces, and anything else your teams repeatedly request.
EDP covers everything from technology standards to security to team management and administration. It’s a complete solution with resources for every aspect of success we have discussed so far.
Let’s bring this all home
Strategic mentorship can help all of your developers. It can improve technical skills, strategic thinking, and adaptability.
Beyond that, you can foster innovation and adaptability.
You empower mentorship with tools that provide your needs while still folding into company infrastructure. Expanding the role in such a holistic way offers personal, professional, and company-wide benefits. Everyone wins.
StackSpot as a solution for Tech leadership
StackSpot EDP is an excellent alternative for technical leaders looking to create, reuse, and distribute software standards. It offers fast developer onboarding, improved governance and compliance, and focuses developer time on the business feature.
With the platform’s support, leaders can put strategic thinking into practice, encouraging a culture of innovation and high performance in technology teams.
If you want even more ideas for tech leadership, follow our newsletter.
Want to read more content like this on “tech leadership”? Visit our blog!
