At any point in time, one is leading or being led by someone. Everyone is a leader within a context. You might be led by a leader in your company. Mostly because you are the bottom of the organization. However, when you are at home, you lead your family. If you are a wife, you lead your husband (sorry guys, it is just the fact). If you are a husband, you lead your kids (how dare you lead your wife 😛 ).

I just take a small context for this post: You lead a development team. Take a more common scenario that I have seen:

You lead a developer team.

A leader can be a technical leader, a scrum master, a manager, … The context is pretty much the same: You take care of a team.

There Small Things

Three things I consider the most important: Accountability, Mentor, and Cheer Leader.

Accountability

I like military principles. When a soldier is in a battle, his captain and comrades are his life. He trusts them. I know, in our IT job, most of the time it is not a Dead-Or-Alive situation. That might be a reason why leaders do not care so much about building accountability.

Mentor

Did you forget to help your member growing? Deep inside, everyone wants to grow. They want to be useful. They are expecting someone to guide them, to help them in a positive way. That is you__leader.

Should you add “Mentor” in your responsibility bell? Your call! I highly suggest you should.

By helping other, you are helping yourself. You help them grow, they will lift you up.

Cheer Leader

Well, this is not a football match. But you get the idea. Make the team closer, talk more to each other, discuss openly.

Working is not easy. There is stress. But, there should be joy most of the time.

Another Sand in the Sea

There are thousands of articles, books, seminars, classes … about “Leader and Management” topic. They are useful resources. I have read some of them. The more I read the more confuse I am.

Finally, I found out: Hey, wait a minute! There are too much! Maybe I should start with 3 small things and change my mindset.

Everyone has deserved a chance to grow. So I am!