I haven't been in that precise position, but I have been in other leadership positions. The biggest lesson I've had to learn is: it's all about the people. First and foremost, leading is a social skill (although there are of course technical components involved too). As a leader, your job is to care for your followers. For a person who is as task-oriented as I used to be (and you seem to be similar), that is a tedious lesson to learn. But once you've learnt it, it turns out to also be very rewarding to you personally.
Two books that really helped me:
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John Maxwell)
Empathy (i.e. the ability to understand what’s going on in someone’s head) is a key leadership trait in my opinion. The good news is that you can develop this skill.
First and foremost, listen. Use 1:1 meetings to talk about how the person is doing, not what they’re doing. Ask open-ended questions. One of the most underused and most powerful questions in the workplace: “how does that make you feel?”
Pay attention to weak signals, like someone changing their daily routine, being snappier than usual in team meetings, etc. Learn how the people in your team usually behave, what they like and don’t like.
Then, put yourself in their shoes. This is easier than you think: if you’re used to writing code, chances are you can emulate pretty complex systems in your head (like the behavior of the piece of code you’re working on). A normal human being is a complex system that you can learn to emulate, by which I mean that once you know how someone usually behaves, what motivates them and so forth, and you know their current situation (see step 1: “listen”), then you can take a pretty good guess at their internal state.
Once you know how your team works, both as individuals and as a team, your job is simply to keep them in a state of maximal happiness. And they will move mountains.
Two books that really helped me:
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John Maxwell)
- Leaders Eat Last (Simon Sinek)