Leadership Diaries

Intro: In our previous post New Role, New Team, and New Challenge , I mentioned the challenges I faced while stepping into a leadership role for an existing team. If you haven't read it yet, please check it out. In this post, I'll share the challenges I faced while setting up a new team from scratch. Pre-Context: Immediately after taking on the leadership role, I was tasked with setting up a team with just a couple of people. For the role, we screened over 100+ candidates  and interviewed around 70 candidates . Only two of them made it to the final round, and eventually, just one candidate with 2 years of experience was selected. Context: The selected candidate joined a month later. For the first two weeks, he studied Java, its internals, and our company-specific frameworks. In the following two weeks, he underwent knowledge transfer. He completed everything with below average score, and we assumed he would perform strongly once onboarded to the project. But that didn't hap...

When I was promoted as a Team Lead, I had to take charge of one of the existing teams while also setting up two new smaller teams with a few members each. Building a new team comes with its own challenges, but leading an already established team is a completely different experience. The existing team had a few senior members who had been there from the beginning. One of them strongly believed that he knew the product and the codebase better than me. Whenever I delegated tasks to him, he would not prioritize them. If I tried explaining the use cases, he would not listen. Over time, his output dropped significantly. I knew that before my manager noticed this issue, I had to address it. I have always believed that most conflicts can be solved through open discussion, so I invited him for a one-on-one meeting. During that meeting, I understood his perspective and also gathered some feedback from him. I assured him that I would take his feedback seriously and that he would notice changes st...

The gym I was going to had a master who stood 7 feet tall and weighed around 90 kilograms (198 pounds). He was the perfect role model for a gym master. One day, he got a better offer from another gym and decided to leave. Everyone at our gym felt a little sad about it, but we also knew this was not the end. A new master would eventually come. The very next day, a man around 5 feet tall with a bulky build joined our gym. At first, everyone thought he was going to be a trainee, but to our surprise, he was introduced as our new master. Many members felt disappointed. For newcomers like me, it did not matter much. To us, he was someone who knew more about the gym than we did. But the senior members did not see him as a true master. They believed they were stronger and knew more than him. The new master, however, did not let this bother him. He continued teaching, even though many ignored him. Within a week of joining, he surprised everyone. One day, he began practicing along with senior me...