When Balancing Execution and Management is Too Overwhelming for a Team Lead (feat. Zhuge Liang)

Pro tips for becoming a team lead who drives sustainable performance

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The birth of a team lead

No matter the size of the company, one situation you'll inevitably encounter as the organization grows is the moment a team lead is born.

Often, the situation that follows this birth is the burnout of that very team lead. Based on my own past and observing the situations around me, I've noticed something.

Ultimately, I've frequently seen new team leads hit burnout when they fail to manage their workload while trying to juggle both execution and management.

To bring up some examples from my own experience where workload balancing failed:

• When there are too many quarterly goals to achieve

• When taking the brunt of teammates' requests for help and saying yes to all of them

• When the team lead is personally fixing every critical issue that pops up

• When trying to gather everyone's opinions and make a decision that satisfies everyone

• When the number of managed members rapidly increases, leading to a ton of 1:1 time

The ultimate goal of a team lead

As the leader of an organization, what exactly is the ultimate goal a team lead should be pursuing?

You need to understand that a leader's goal is to create sustainable performance. It's not just about hitting short-term wins, but building an organization that consistently delivers results.

In many observations, including my own, there seem to be a lot of cases where knowledge transfer is mistaken for organizational performance. So, what should a leader actually do to create sustainable performance?

I believe there are roughly three types of work a leader must do.

Namely: strategy, managing, and execution.

If I were to graph my thoughts on these types of work by level, it would look like this:

The very first thing you need to consider upon becoming a team lead is strategy. It's not necessarily some grand, special task; I think strategy simply starts with setting the team's goals.

🤯 Starting something new: Setting a strategy

As I mentioned earlier, the first step in setting a strategy is setting a goal. To set a goal, I believe you need to know the company's vision and mission, and understand the bigger business picture.

Once you do that, you can roughly see what kind of contribution your organization can make. That's when you set the organizational goals.

Goals must be easy to recall even in tough situations, so they should be set clearly and simply. (It helps to think of it as ensuring teammates can recall the goal within 5 seconds.)

Next, you need to separate what to focus on and what to drop to achieve that goal. If you can't decide what to drop, you won't be able to focus, and consequently, you won't be able to hit the goal.

Setting goals and deciding what to focus on versus what to drop can be seen as the core of strategy.

🏄‍♂️ Team play: Managing

Once the goal is set, you need to structure a team capable of producing results, which requires managing members.

You can consider this process the main role of managing. First and foremost, it's crucial to check if each member has clearly understood the organization's goals. (If the members' hearts are burning with passion during this process, it feels incredibly rewarding.)

After ensuring the goals are understood like this, you should divide up the work in a way that maximizes each member's strengths. Because members will be using their own strengths to achieve the goals, they'll kick off their work brimming with anticipation.

To successfully distribute work, identify strengths, and boost morale, you need to proactively check in with members through frequent 1:1s beforehand. You also need to continuously identify any discomforts or blockers they are experiencing through periodic check-ins.

The leader must then do whatever it takes to remove those blockers.

🏃 A changed mindset: Execution

Then comes execution.

When handling execution, it's much better to think of yourself not as the main contributor, but as someone standing by to help other members contribute.

In the case of engineering, this might take the form of helping members out by assisting with the architecture for a specific feature. You're basically helping members feel a sense of accomplishment by letting them take the feature through to completion. Naturally, since a team lead knows the history and core logic well, it might feel more comfortable to just handle the main tasks yourself.

However, this is when you must be careful: "Let's not make Zhuge Liang's mistake." Zhuge Liang, the famous strategist, was a natural mastermind and a righteous, loyal talent. But he worked late into the night, personally handling even minor punishments like 20 lashes, and tried to take on all the work himself. Because of this, his workload ballooned to a completely unsustainable level.

On the flip side, Cao Cao found a brilliant talent in Sima Yi and fully delegated to him. It's said that Sima Yi felt relieved when he saw Zhuge Liang unable to trust others, micromanaging trivial matters, and continually trying to command every battle himself.

In the end, Zhuge Liang died of illness, and the state of Shu fell.

Coming back to the main point, I believe that when a leader is doing execution work, they must adopt a supportive stance that empowers members to be the main contributors, rather than trying to be the main contributor themselves.

Therefore, the best method would be to find the right person and delegate. Of course, there will be times when you have to handle the execution yourself, but even then, I urge you to think about who else besides you might be good for the job.

If you do it this way:

• You won't chase too many goals and will be able to focus on a few key themes.

• And based on those priorities, you'll be able to gently turn down requests from teammates.

• Because you're helping other members handle critical issues themselves instead of the team lead having to do it,

• The number of people who can resolve critical issues will gradually increase, allowing the team to avoid a single point of failure.

• Because you have goals focused on a select few things, you can move much faster when making decisions.

• When delegation is handled properly, you'll be able to comfortably secure 1:1 time to check on your members' motivation and blockers.

One last thing to remember...

Ultimately as a leader, you end up with various contexts while juggling the three types of work: strategy, managing, and execution.

Here, if you divide your time management into two modes—Manager Mode (strategy, managing) and Maker Mode (execution)—you can minimize context switching and dive into highly focused work.

If we look at the characteristics of each mode:

In Maker Mode, you need to block off work time in 3-to-4-hour chunks to secure time for deep focus.

In Manager Mode, it's best to schedule multiple short meetings (under 1 hour each) back-to-back.

Ideally, scheduling on a daily basis is effective for reducing cognitive load. For example, Monday could be Manager Mode, and Tuesday could be Maker Mode.

In conclusion,

Actually, I wrote this post while thinking of someone who has been contributing massively as a member and will now be contributing as a new team lead.

I wrote this wondering how I could help them. Looking back, the very first problem I faced when becoming a team lead was the conflict between managing vs. execution, and I wanted to pass on the lessons I learned while overcoming that to this person.

Just as we've successfully overcome things together so far, let's keep overcoming them together going forward 💪