Learn to trust your team

Trust is important in a team. Without trust you do not belong to a team because if you cannot trust your teammates then you’ll end up checking up on them, double guessing them or playing political games to out manoeuvre them and this is counter productive.

I got to be lead developer because my managers noticed my contributions, that is the work I was doing made me stand out from the other individuals. One of the harder lessons I’m (still) learning is to rely on my team. I want to make sure that every project is as successful as it can be, that all code satisfies my own set of standards but unless I’m prepared to actually do all the coding of 4 people (and there is really no way I could do that – with CodeRush you can code faster with a guitar than a qwerty keyboard, but not faster than 4 people!). To achieve the same degree of ‘success’ I am now no longer measured purely by my own contributions but by those of the team I lead and so I must trust my team.

The flip side of this is that trust doesn’t just happen. I can’t just expect or insist that there is trust so I try to make sure that I never ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do myself, and that I don’t keep all the good work for myself – we are a team so we all get our share of fun (and less fun) jobs.