Technical Leader Worries: To Be a Tech Expert or Not to Be

The majority of IT leaders are promoted IT specialists. Many times, this happens surprisingly, and we are usually not well prepared for this change. We love our tech job—programming—and suddenly someone wants to take it from us. Of course, we are free people and can say “NO,” but it doesn’t happen too often. Becoming a leader may be the next real step in our career, a new opportunity to learn something completely different.

No matter how much we love a new role, one question wants to be answered: Ok, I am a leader. Should I still be an expert? Or, as is very common, I still WANT to be an expert and how do I manage that while being a leader?

Strategies for Balancing Leadership and Technical Expertise

There are many ways you can handle this. Some may be quite reasonable, while others may not.

Strong Expert

You choose this strategy when remaining an expert is extremely important to you, and becoming a leader will not stop you from developing your hard tech skills. It’s quite possible but usually means that you have to spend a lot of your spare time to keep in touch with new technologies. I know a few people who chose this strategy. They usually have no family (and I am afraid they will not have one because of this strategy, but this is not an obligation).

Just Leader

This is another strategy, which is the easiest to handle day to day. You just give up the technical side while still having precious experience, which is more than enough to work with the team. But this strategy is hard to accept for those who still want to develop their expert skills.

Coach

This is a strategy enabling you to take the best of both worlds. You are mainly focused on leader-type tasks but use your team and vice versa as leverage. What does this mean? When someone needs help and you can help, you share your knowledge, showing how a person can approach the task. In turn, when a fellow from your team uses a new tool, library, or technology, you may ask for an introduction or for them to share the experience. You can learn a lot this way and still be in touch with tech stuff. When I used this strategy for the first time, I was surprised that within six months, I learned much more than during the year before (almost not coding at all). Another surprise was that when I needed to use this knowledge later, it was quite easy for me.

Conclusion

What I also want to say is that the choice expressed in the subject of this post is not a dichotomy; it’s more like a continuum where you are probably somewhere in between. Another dimension of this phenomenon is time. Time, in some way, moves you towards a leadership position, because the longer you are in a leader position, the more your expert skills become outdated (as you are no longer fully devoted to the expert work). This may be a sad statement for some of you, but it’s just like that.

(Text translated and moved from original old blog automatically by AI. May contain inaccuracies.)