Gregor Ojstersek, a former engineer turned CTO, breaks down seven mistakes new engineering leads make: micromanaging, hiding challenges from the team, over-preparing work, and avoiding delegation. He shows how each one burns out leaders and stunts team growth, then offers fixes like delegating decisions, communicating the big picture, and using one-on-ones to build trust.
Growing from an engineer to a lead role can be very exciting. However, it also comes with its own set of challenges. Many engineers make the mistake of assuming that technical skills alone are enough to succeed in a lead role, but this is far from being true. In my career, I grew from engineer to lead roles and all the way to CTO, and in today's video I'll be sharing 7 common mistakes engineers make when they grow to their first lead role. So let's first break down what exactly do I mean by a lead role. There are many different options when it when it comes to lead roles, and the 3 most common are being a team lead, which is the first step into the management path. The second option is being a staff engineer or a tech lead, which is the next step in the IC path after senior engineer. And the third one is being a software architect, which is part of the architecture path. These are all roles where making others around you is expected more than just your own individual contribution. Now let's get into the 7 common mistakes engineers make when they grow to their first lead role. Let's start with the first one: not letting go of control. As engineers, we are accustomed to being in control of our work and being responsible for the outcomes. However, in a lead role, you need to learn to delegate tasks and trust your team to handle them. Micromanaging every single detail will just create mistrust. You need to focus on guidance and support and allow your team to take ownership of their work. This way, you create a culture of trust where team members feel empowered. What happens a lot of times is that lead engineers still try to focus on doing it all themselves, which doesn't provide the best results and it can lead to burnout. Now let's go to the second mistake: lack of transparency. Transparency is key in building trust with your team. It's important that you communicate openly about the team's goals, challenges, overall progress, and also expectations. If you don't do that, your team won't understand the big picture and may get frustrated and disengaged. If you just try to assign tasks without sharing the big picture and the business value behind it, the team won't feel motivated to solve them. Let's go to the third one: too much shielding of the team. It's natural that you want to protect your team from criticism or difficult situations. However, shielding the team from challenges can prevent them from learning and growing. Instead, work with your team to address challenges and find solutions together. When people feel like they're part of the solution, they become more invested in its success. I made this mistake when I first grew to become a manager, and it caused issues with me being too much involved in certain things, and I had less time to focus on really important things. Let's go to the fourth mistake: trying to do too much overall. It's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to prove your leadership abilities by taking on too much work. I certainly did that mistake when I wanted to be the best manager over the week and finish the most tasks over the weekend. Well, that didn't work so well for me, and when I started to delegate more, it made a whole lot of difference. The fifth mistake: doing too much preparation work for your team members. While it's important to do a certain preparation or the composition of work beforehand, doing it in too much details will result in you spending time on not so crucial things, and also your team members will not be growing as well. This prevents your team to develop important skills which they need to succeed. Instead, the way to go is to provide resources and support they need to take ownership of their work and develop their skills. This way they can grow and develop their skills, which benefits them, the whole team, and also the overall organization. Now let's go to the sixth one: trying to be involved in every detailed small decision. This doesn't work really well because it's not possible for you to do that. But unfortunately, I've seen it a lot of times where it can lead to burning out. What I like to suggest is to focus on taking charge of important decisions and delegate the less impactful ones to your team. And the last one, and definitely not the least one, not trying to get to know the team members a bit more personally. When you're able to get to know your team members a bit better, it creates a great environment for collaboration. Take the time to get to know your team members about their interests, and goals. And I suggest to use your one-to-one meetings for that. Take 5 minutes to get to know your team members better before moving to other important topics. I'm curious to hear about your advice for first-time leads. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
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