What skills do you need as a software developer?
Obviously, you need technical skills that allow you to do your job. But you also need a variety of soft skills that, among other things, help you communicate with team members, customers, and other stakeholders.
If you want to become a team leader on a project — or you want a more senior position — you’ll also need leadership skills. These allow you to organize software development teams more effectively, inspire and motivate team members to deliver their best work, and resolve conflicts within the team.
Ultimately, effective leadership ensures that the team is as efficient and productive as possible. And even if you don’t aim to land a more senior position, leadership skills can also serve you well by helping you:
- Communicate more effectively,
- Understand and serve customers better, and
- Deliver better work.
Sounds good, right? With that in mind, in this post, we’ll look at leadership skills in more detail — and how you can improve yours.
What are Leadership Skills?
Leadership skills are some of the most important and in-demand soft skills you can have as a software developer. But what are leadership skills exactly?
Simply put: leadership skills are the skills you use to organize a software development team, inspire and motivate them, and build a sense of common purpose. In other words, with leadership skills, you guide and help a team to reach a shared goal.
Ultimately, this helps them to perform better, and deliver high-quality products consistently.
Leadership skills examples
It’s important to remember that leadership is not just one skill. Instead, it involves a combination of different competencies and skills working together.
You can almost think of it as the different parts of an engine. If these parts work well together, the engine’s performance will be top-notch and it will be efficient.
Likewise, if you’re able to master all these skills, you’ll be a strong leader and manage your team effectively. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the most important leadership skills in software development.
Technical knowledge
In software development, the foundation of being a leader is having strong technical knowledge. This helps to ensure that your team works according to coding conventions, client requirements, product specifications, and quality standards.
Think of it this way: for a captain to effectively sail a ship across vast oceans, they need to know how every part of the ship works, what it can do, and what it can’t. This is the only way they can guide their crew to safely navigate the ship from one point to the next.
Likewise, if you’re a tech lead on a project, you need to know and understand your team’s entire technology stack inside and out. As such, you’ll need deep technical skills in:
- Your team’s top programming languages and frameworks
- Software design and architecture
- Implementation
- Database design, manipulation, and management
- Debugging and software testing
- Application deployment
- Project management and project management methodologies
Emotional intelligence
Technical knowledge is only one part of the puzzle, though. Another crucial component of leadership in software development is emotional intelligence. It not only allows you to manage your own emotions, but also those of your team.
Ultimately, this ensures that you’re able to manage their stress levels and help them deliver their best work. This, in turn, keeps your team efficient and effective no matter what the circumstances.
Emotional intelligence is more than just managing the emotions of your team, however. It also allows you to serve your customers better. This is simply because, through emotional intelligence, you’ll be able to understand what they want, their pain points, and the challenges they face. Because of this, you’ll be able to give them the solutions they need to solve their problems.
Considering the above, some of the skills you need for emotional intelligence include:
- Empathy
- Self-confidence
- Commitment
- Understanding
- Optimism
- Advanced interpersonal skills
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Communication
It’s a fact that when you want to lead a software development team, you need to have excellent communication skills. These skills allow you to communicate effectively with your team, and clearly spell out every team member’s specific responsibilities and what you expect of them.
As such, you’ll communicate your expectations, their roles and responsibilities, and — more importantly — the project’s specifications to them in a way that’s easy to understand, consistent with your processes, and straightforward to implement.
Excellent communication skills are also invaluable when it comes to dealing with customers and other stakeholders. This is simply because, as the leader of your team, you’ll often be the bridge between them and your team.
As such, you’ll communicate to different audiences. This means you should tailor your communication based on whom you’re talking to.
For example, you’ll typically need to translate the customer’s requirements into actionable information your team can use. You’ll also need to convey technical feedback back to the customer in language that is simpler to understand.
And this is where effective communication comes in. Without it, your team will struggle to know what to do and your customer will — quite probably — get a product with different specifications than they asked for.
Customer-centric
And speaking of the customer, as a software team leader, you’ll need to keep the customer — whether internal or external — top-of-mind throughout the product development lifecycle. And let’s face it, the adage, “The customer is always right”, is no less true when it comes to software development.
In fact, it can be even more true as software today is all about the customer experience. So, just as a business aims to solve their customers’ problems and give them a stellar customer experience, you should do the same.
Effective leadership will allow you to do this, as you’ll be able to ensure that your development team incorporates all of your customer’s requirements into the end-product.
Self-development
One of the most vital components of effective leadership in software development is self-development. Generally, all software developers are driven by a passion for learning new things. In fact, according to Hired’s 2021 State of Software Engineering report, the majority of software engineers mentioned that new challenges and continuous learning were some of the main reasons they decided to pursue a career in software development.
For leadership positions in software development, this is even more true. The current climate requires companies to come up with innovative solutions to the problems people experience before their competitors do. This means, as a team leader, you’ll need to be abreast of the latest software and technology developments, product discovery, trends, and in-demand programming languages.
In this way, you’ll allow your team to deliver the software your customers want and their customers need.
Read More: Can I Become a Software Engineer Without a College Degree?
Team building
As a leader in software development, you’ll need to help your team maintain a strong bond while working towards the same goal. In this way, you’ll help your team communicate and collaborate more effectively.
One of the best ways to do this is to adopt a leadership approach where you forego any traditional hierarchical constraints and see yourself as a partner to your team. Once you build these partnerships with your team members, you’ll not only help them achieve their goals, but you’ll also aid them in their development and growth.
When you do this, you’ll ensure that your team works effectively and efficiently to deliver high-quality software to your customers. It goes further than this, though. When you take this approach, it will also help you retain the best talent on your team and unlock their full potential.
Problem-solving
Let’s face it, no list of the top leadership skills in software development will be complete without mentioning problem-solving. After all, software development, at its core, is about solving problems.
But the problem-solving capabilities of a team leader go far further than just writing code to solve a customer’s problem. Apart from your customers’ problems, you’ll also need to solve any problems that arise from your team’s day-to-day development activities and remove the obstacles they face.
This often involves finding a simple solution that allows your team to work together more effectively. This ultimately means: achieving this within the customer’s budget and timeframe.
As such, to be a leader that can solve problems, you need some of the following skills:
- Analytical skills
- Critical thinking
- Strategic planning
Decisiveness
Another crucial component of effective problem-solving skills is decisiveness. With this skill, you’ll be able to make decisions quickly based on the information you have at hand.
Typically, when making these decisions you won’t have all the necessary information available. This means that, to some extent, you’ll need to draw on your past experiences to make decisions and solve problems. With experience, you’ll be able to know what solutions will work best in a specific set of circumstances — and you’ll be confident enough to be accountable for your decision.
This is mainly why effective decision-making often only comes with extensive experience in software development. The end result of being decisive is that you’ll be able to make those important decisions when your team faces challenges. This, ultimately, will ensure that they can work more efficiently and effectively.
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Integrity
When thinking of integrity, people often think about honesty first. It goes far further than this, though. Integrity is also about standing firm on a set of values and principles. This is especially important in a software development team where the team’s culture is guided by a set of values and behaviors.
Having integrity also means making decisions based on these values and principles no matter how difficult they are or what their outcome could be. This means, as a leader with integrity, you’ll sometimes need to make tough calls and treat all team members equally, irrespective of your personal preferences.
Innovation
In a competitive market, businesses need to be innovative and find the solutions their customers need to solve their problems before anyone else does. In fact, innovation needs to be a priority if the business wants to survive.
To foster innovation, leaders need to create an environment where experimenting and new ideas are encouraged, even if they’re likely to fail. In this way, software development teams can figure out what works, what doesn’t, and, ultimately, build better software.
The best way to do this is by setting the example yourself. Try new ideas out for yourself, and show your team that it’s safe to try new things no matter if they succeed or fail.
Delegation
Let’s face it, no one can do everything by themselves. And this is a significant issue with leaders, as they often believe that they’re the only ones who could do something right. The inevitable result is that they end up overworked and overstressed.
That’s where delegation comes in. It’s invaluable when it comes to relieving team leader workload and stress. When you’re able to effectively delegate some of your tasks and responsibilities, you’ll make your entire team more efficient and productive.
Keep in mind, though, these are just some examples of the leadership skills you’ll use as a team leader in software development. Some others include time management, self-motivation, people management, positivity, creativity, resilience, and more.
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Leadership vs management
From the above leadership skills you might need as a software development team lead, an important question arises: what is the difference between effective leadership and management? This distinction is crucial as people often use these two terms interchangeably. But there are actually substantial differences.
Summing up, the differences between leadership and management are:
- Leaders determine the vision, managers implement it. Generally, leaders are responsible for setting a company’s vision. As such, they have a clear vision of where they want their company or product to be in the future. In turn, managers are responsible for keeping employees and team members on track and aligned with this vision.
- For leaders, it’s about the ideas; while for managers, it’s about the execution. Managers focus on the execution of the vision for the company. To do this, they ensure that employees stay productive and work efficiently. Conversely, leaders constantly think of new ideas to improve a company’s processes and operations.
- Leaders focus on inspiring people, while managers focus on driving their success. Leaders use their set of skills like communication, empathy, and team building to great effect to inspire people while managers empower people with a positive work experience to drive their success.
- A Leader think about the future while managers work in the present. Managers focus on the implementation of the right processes, strategies, and organizational structuring to drive efficiency and productivity in the present. In contrast, leaders think about the future and ways to create new opportunities for a company and how to capitalize on them.
- Leaders influence culture while managers endorse it. Leaders define and shape a company’s culture or, in other words, its system of values, beliefs, and behaviors. In contrast, managers implement the processes necessary to ensure that employees across a company live up to that culture.
Read More: Share Your Thought Leadership on LinkedIn to Improve Your Career
Important Tips & Strategies for Improving Leadership Skills
Now that we’ve seen why leadership skills are so important in software development, it’s time we look at some ways in which you can improve your leadership skills. Not only will the development of these skills help you manage projects better, but they will also give you the foundation you need to ensure future career success.
1. Be clear on goals
One of the best things you can do as a leader is give your team clear goals that they need to achieve. In this way, they’ll know exactly what to do and what you expect of them. Another benefit is that clear goals give your team something to track their own progress against.
As a result, they’ll stay on track and be more driven to achieve these goals. So, in simple terms, they’ll be more productive and efficient.
2. Take on more
If you’re aiming for a leadership position, an excellent way to improve your leadership skills and grow into a leader is to take on more responsibilities than your job position requires. It’s simple: the more you do, the more you’ll learn. This, in turn, allows you to focus on competencies outside your area of expertise and improve your skills.
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3. Be disciplined
There’s no denying that a good leader needs discipline. This means, in order to be an effective leader, you’ll need to demonstrate that you’re disciplined. Meet deadlines constantly, be on time, and keep appointments.
But being disciplined goes further than this. When you, as a team leader, are disciplined, you’ll also inspire others to be more disciplined. And with discipline, your team will be able to execute their plans better and reach their goals more easily.
4. Encourage teamwork
The success of any software development job relies on teamwork. Simply put, without it, there will be less innovation and no valuable relationships to rely on when challenges arise.
Good leaders, therefore, encourage teamwork and delegate tasks to their team members. This not only makes the team more productive and efficient but also empowers them — especially when you delegate tasks to them outside their comfort zones.
5. Learn to follow
Flowing from teamwork, effective leaders also appreciate that it’s appropriate to pass some of their responsibilities on to other team members when they need to and when the circumstances demand it.
It’s also vital that, as a leader, you don’t feel intimidated when a team member disagrees with you or advances some ideas of their own in order to solve the problems customers have. In fact, instead of feeling intimidated, true leaders value these opinions. The result: team members feel encouraged to give them.
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6. Think critically
To be an effective leader, it’s vital that you be able to think critically. This means you should be able to identify issues and problems before they happen. If you do, you’ll be able to eliminate bigger problems and challenges before they turn into disasters. This is an especially valuable skill when a team is working with complex projects.
7. Listen better
As mentioned earlier, communication skills are crucial for any leader. But often, when you think of communication skills, you’ll mainly think about speaking. However, listening skills are just as important.
What often happens is that you’ll think of your answer while listening to a team member and before you’ve heard everything they have to say. As a result, you miss out on valuable information which, in turn, makes your answer less relevant and incomplete.
Also, without effective listening skills, you won’t be able to get proper feedback from your team on the progress of a project and the challenges they face.
8. Keep on learning
One of the best ways to grow as a leader is to constantly learn new things. This will not only allow you to keep your skills up to date, but will also equip you for any challenges your team might face.
And this is especially relevant in today’s software development industry where new technologies become available and existing ones evolve at a rapid pace.
9. Respect team members
Obviously, as a leader, you’ll get more out of your team if they respect you. But the thing is, respect is not a given and it needs to be earned. So, you’ll be able to earn your team’s respect if you respect them first and are consistently reliable.
10. Resolve conflicts
Within a team context, it’s inevitable that there will be disputes and conflicts. So to be an effective leader, you’ll need conflict resolution skills. This means you’ll have to develop the skills necessary to resolve conflicts in a positive way while keeping relationships intact.
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Wrapping Up
Whether you’re on the hunt for a more senior position or whether you’re just starting out as a software developer, leadership skills are vital for you to grow in your career. Hopefully, this post helped illustrate why they’re important and showed you some things you can do to improve yours.
If you have any more questions about developing your skills and how they can help you advance and grow your career as a software developer, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below, and thanks for reading!
