How to Lead a Team

Managers & Tech Leads

Engineering leadership includes two closely connected roles. An engineering manager supports the team’s performance, productivity, and well-being while balancing individual needs with the goals of the business. A tech lead focuses on the technical direction of the product, including architecture, technology choices, priorities, and project coordination. Together, they help engineers find work that matches their abilities and gives them opportunities to grow.

On smaller teams, one person may fill both roles as a Tech Lead Manager (TLM). This requires balancing technical contributions with delegation and people management, which can be difficult for someone moving from an individual contributor role. Larger teams at Google generally divide these responsibilities between two people so each can give their work enough attention. Across these roles, effective leadership depends on helping other people succeed. A tech lead who delegates a task, even when completing it personally would be faster, can build the team’s skills and ability to work independently.

Moving from an Individual Contributor Role to a Leadership Role

Every project needs someone to guide it, and that person is often an engaged individual contributor who gradually starts settling disagreements, making decisions, and coordinating teammates. The chapter calls this drift “manageritis”. Even engineers who insist they will never manage can end up leading after doing their work well. The chapter does not try to convince readers to become managers. Instead, it explains how good leaders serve their teams through humility, respect, and trust, so that anyone can understand leadership well enough to guide their own work.

Many engineers are hesitant to take on a leadership role, and the chapter identifies several common reasons:

• Less time coding: Writing code produces visible results each day, while management work is harder to measure and its benefits take longer to appear. New leaders can feel unproductive even when their team is doing well.
• The Peter Principle: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” People tend to be promoted until they reach a role they cannot perform well. Google tries to avoid this by expecting people to work above their current level for a time before they are promoted.
• Bad past managers: Engineers who have mostly worked for poor managers may have little desire to become one, as they’ve never had a model for what to do that would be successful.

The chapter also offers reasons to consider leading. An individual’s output is limited, but guiding a team allows a person to have a much larger impact. People who step in when a team lacks direction often discover that they are good at helping and protecting others. Google asserts that someone has to lead, and a capable engineer is often the right person to do it.

The Engineering Manager

The common image of a rigid, controlling manager goes back to military hierarchies and to factories in the Industrial Revolution. Factory workers could be trained quickly and replaced easily, so supervisors relied on a “carrot-and-stick” approach: reward people who comply and punish those who do not. Google says that software engineering is different. Engineers working on large codebases can need months to become productive, and creative work requires time, support, and room to think. Research suggests that carrot-and-stick management actually hurts this kind of work.

Today’s engineering managers are more effective when they trust their teams. When people can see that their manager trusts them, they feel “a positive pressure to live up to that trust.” The chapter’s key distinction is that traditional managers focus on how work gets done, while great managers focus on what gets done and let the team decide how to do it.

Antipatterns

The chapter describes several leadership antipatterns: habits that undermine trust, weaken collaboration, and make a team less effective. Recognizing these habits helps leaders understand how their own decisions affect the people around them.

• Hiring pushovers: Choosing people who will never challenge the leader limits the team’s independence. Strong teammates bring different ideas, question mistakes, and can eventually take on leadership responsibilities.
• Ignoring low performers: Avoiding difficult conversations leaves other team members carrying extra work and allows frustration to grow. Leaders should address problems early through respectful coaching, clear expectations, and small, measurable goals.
• Ignoring human issues: Technical progress depends on people whose needs and circumstances vary. A leader who dismisses personal challenges can lose the team’s trust, even when the work itself is going well.
• Trying to be everyone’s friend: A manager’s influence over people’s careers changes the relationship. Leaders can remain approachable and supportive while maintaining boundaries and making fair decisions.
• Compromising the hiring bar: Filling positions quickly can create lasting problems if candidates do not meet the requirements of the role. Maintaining hiring standards protects the team’s time and ability to succeed.
• Treating the team like children: Constant supervision and unnecessary restrictions discourage ownership. Giving capable engineers responsibility shows trust and allows them to develop their judgment.

These antipatterns show why humility, respect, and trust matter in everyday leadership. A leader needs to listen, address problems directly, and give people enough support and independence to do their work well.

Positive Patterns

The chapter also describes positive patterns: practices the authors have seen in effective leaders at Google, in other leaders they have observed, and in their own mentors. These habits help leaders earn trust, keep the team moving, and give people room to grow.

• Lose the ego: Humility does not mean a lack of confidence. Leaders can hold strong opinions while building a shared team identity, trusting the people closest to the work, welcoming criticism, and apologizing sincerely when they make mistakes.
• Be a Zen master: Teams take emotional cues from their leader, so staying calm and avoiding excessive cynicism matters. Answering questions with questions helps teammates reach their own solutions and keep ownership.
• Be a catalyst: Leaders often move work forward by building consensus rather than relying on authority. A team may choose to let its lead make quick decisions, and leaders do not need complete agreement before acting.
• Remove roadblocks: When the team is stuck on a technical or organizational problem, the leader steps in to get it moving. Knowing the right person to ask is often more valuable than knowing the answer.
• Be a teacher and a mentor: Leaders should let junior engineers learn by doing a task, even when it would be faster to do it themselves. Good mentors explain clearly and judge how much help someone needs without over-explaining.
• Set clear goals: A concise mission statement, clear priorities, and guidance on trade-offs keep everyone moving in the same direction. Once the goals are set, the leader can step back and only check in periodically.
• Be honest: Leaders should admit when they do not know something or cannot share information. Difficult feedback should be specific, private, and respectful rather than hidden inside a “compliment sandwich,” where the criticism is easy to miss.
• Track happiness: Leaders should watch for burnout, recognize good work, and share thankless tasks fairly. Asking what people need and making their career goals explicit helps leaders offer useful support.

These patterns share a common thread: a leader’s main job is to support the people doing the work. By staying humble, honest, and focused on clear goals, leaders create a team where people can do their best work and grow over time.

The Unexpected Question

The author, Fitzpatrick, describes preparing for difficult questions before his first meeting with then-CEO Eric Schmidt. Instead, Schmidt ended the meeting by asking whether Fitzpatrick needed anything. The question caught him off guard because he had prepared to defend his work rather than ask for support.

This example shows how a simple question can put servant leadership into practice. Asking team members what they need creates an opportunity to discuss obstacles, missing resources, or concerns that might otherwise stay hidden. Asking regularly during one-on-one meetings gives people time to recognize their needs and become more comfortable sharing them.

These conversations can also help leaders understand job satisfaction and career goals. Someone may want to learn a skill, take on more responsibility, or receive recognition for work that has gone unnoticed. Leaders should also recognize that circumstances outside work can affect a person’s capacity, while respecting their privacy. Listening and following through on these conversations helps turn concern for the team into useful support.

Other Tips & Tricks

The chapter offers several practical habits for supporting a team. Delegation is especially important because it gives others opportunities to learn and prevents the leader from becoming a bottleneck. Leaders should also stay involved enough to understand the work. Taking on an unpleasant task can show commitment and help a leader learn what the team is dealing with.

Developing future leaders is another responsibility. Giving interested team members opportunities to coordinate work or make decisions prepares them to take on more responsibility. This should account for individual interests: engineers who prefer to remain individual contributors also need meaningful opportunities to grow.

Leaders must also address difficult situations before they damage the team. Delaying a conversation about performance or disruptive behavior usually makes the problem harder to resolve. At the same time, leaders should protect the team’s focus by handling unnecessary outside demands and sharing relevant organizational information without passing along every uncertainty.

Finally, effective leaders recognize good work and make room for experiments. Specific praise helps people understand the value of their contributions. When a proposed experiment is easy to reverse and fits the team’s priorities, giving it a chance can encourage learning. Decisions that create lasting commitments deserve more careful consideration.

People Are Like Plants

The author’s mother-in-law, who raised six very children, compared kids to plants when he asked her how she “managed” it. Some need little water and lots of sun, others need shade and damp soil, and some do best with fertilizer. Treating them all the same means none of them gets what they need. Team members work the same way, and a leader’s job is to learn what each person needs. On a team, the two main inputs are motivation and direction. Someone stuck in a rut needs motivation, someone distracted or unsure of what to do needs direction, and someone who feels adrift may need both. Giving either one to a person who does not need it can be frustrating for them.

Direction is fairly simple to provide: understand what needs to be done, organize the work, and break it into manageable tasks. Motivation is more complicated.

Reflection

As future software engineers, we can apply these ideas before holding a formal leadership title. In a class project, leadership might mean clarifying the next milestone, helping a teammate work through a blocker, or making space for someone whose ideas have not been heard. These actions help the group move forward while building trust.

One lesson we can take from this chapter is to reconsider how we measure our contributions. Completing a difficult feature matters, but helping another person understand the code or take ownership of a task can strengthen the whole team. Doing everything ourselves may produce a quick result while leaving teammates without opportunities to learn.

In our next group project, we can put these lessons into practice by asking what support each person needs, agreeing on clear responsibilities, and addressing concerns early. We can also recognize each other’s contributions and share opportunities to lead. The chapter encourages us to see leadership as an ongoing responsibility to help people grow and work effectively together.

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