Technical Competence is a Form of Leadership
I'm a hypocrite.
In another post I talked about building technical competence before leading.
Now I'm about to tell you that building technical competence is a form of leadership.
Which is true?
Both. Let me explain.
What is leadership, really?
Leadership is the ability to get a team to accomplish an objective.
It can take many forms:
- People leadership
- Servant leadership
- Strategic leadership
- Charismatic leadership
But there's another:
Technical leadership
What is technical leadership?
Technical leadership is the process of helping the team win by having a high level of technical expertise in your domain.
If you have a deep understanding of your domain, internalize best practices, and know how to build things the "right way", you can be a technical leader. You can scale your knowledge to the team and help everyone improve their technical skillset.
You're not leading by motivating people, being charismatic, or setting company level strategic priorities.
You lead by using your expertise to help the team achieve its goals.
How to implement technical leadership
Once you have expertise or master in your domain, you can lead by:
- Reducing team errors and mistakes.
- Creating a culture of reviews and feedback.
- Ensuring solutions are resilient and scalable.
- Helping the team adhere to industry best practices.
- Coaching the team and building their technical skillset.
- Implementing systems to ensure standards are followed.
- Pushing technically challenging projects over the finish line.
- Ensuring projects and analyses are completed in a rigorous manner.
If you aren't charismatic, don't worry about it.
If you don't want to manage people, you don't have to.
If big picture thinking isn't your strength, don't focus on it.
If you love the technical side of your work, embrace it.
Leadership can take many forms and leading through technical expertise is a valid option.
So if you love to code, use it to your advantage.