To be successful, every IT team must have a well-rounded leader. Augmented teams are composed of specialists with different personalities and values who often come from different cultures. The leader’s job is to establish a well-oiled system of processes and make sure everybody works together seamlessly.

In this article, we, in the position of an IT consulting and staff augmentation company with years of experience in the industry, will zoom in on the three skills that we consider a must for every IT team leader.

So, if you aspire to assemble a committed and well-performing team of specialists or aim to adeptly manage one, read on!

The areas leaders oversee

To determine which skills a competent leader must possess, we should first understand the notion of leadership and the areas it covers.

The essence of leadership is to build a well-oiled system where the right people are doing the right jobs and are properly motivated. In other words, when speaking of software development team augmentation, a leader has to cover these three areas:

1. People, i.e., the specialists working in the team;
2. Systems, i.e., sets of well-structured and seamlessly performing processes that apply to every aspect of the workflow, for example, a quality control system, a traceability system, and so on;
3. Vision, i.e., a shared understanding of where the company and the project are going.

According to John Adair, a prominent leadership researcher, every leader must pay attention to the following:

1. The task that needs to be done. The manager’s job here is to clearly define it and measure the progress.
2. The commitment of the team. The manager needs to allocate sufficient time to team building.
3. The satisfaction of every individual with their professional growth.

The work of a leader in IT resource augmentation can be divided into five core stages:

1. Setting the objectives for the project as a whole and every iteration and providing the team with a clear vision of their work’s direction and results;
2. Planning;
3. Conducting briefings to make sure that everybody understands the plan;
4. Being involved in the action itself, i.e. project implementation, by monitoring the progress, the quality of work and deliverables, making sure that the team is satisfied, and so on;
5. Reviewing and evaluating the results.

Let’s briefly discuss the key features of the IT consulting and staff augmentation model to understand what's special about it and which skills a well-versed project manager should hone.

The essence and perks of staff augmentation

Staff augmentation services refer to scaling companies’ IT teams up and down by promptly providing them with the needed specialists on demand, as well as overseeing the work of such teams if requested by the customer.

The perks of this cooperation model include:

• Budget efficiency: companies eliminate any expenses pertaining to hiring in-house specialists and setting up office infrastructure for them;

• Instantaneous access to required experts, including those that are challenging to find in the market, like senior developers, qualified DevOps engineers, or IT architects;

• Flexibility: the IT consulting and staff augmentation provider will equip the project with the required specialists just when the customer needs them, adapting to changing requirements;

• Access to extensive expertise and the latest technology stacks.

A leadership challenge within IT resource augmentation is their need to adapt systems and processes to the rapidly changing environment. By the environment, we mean frequently changing projects, requirements, customers, competitors, and team members. Therefore, a well-versed project manager needs to develop and constantly hone certain skills. In the following section, we’ll cover the most crucial of them.

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The top leadership skills in IT consulting and staff augmentation

Which core skills do adept leaders need to nurture in order to perform their duties well?

#1. Communication skills

The ability to clearly communicate their goals and solicit feedback is absolutely essential when working with cross-functional IT teams.

Below, we suggest five efficient methods that can help with this:

1. “Management by wandering around”: Just as the captain of the ship walks around their ship daily to judge the system in its entirety and make sure everything is working seamlessly, it’s recommended that the manager talks to every single person in their team once a week or a month, depending on its size. Ideally, they need to allocate between an hour or two to this activity every day, dedicating about three-quarters of this time to listening to what every person is working on and one-quarter to communicating their thoughts and ideas.

2. “Back to the floor”: It’s recommended that a manager spends from a day to a week every year performing the most basic tasks of their team. This will enable them to understand the possible issues first-hand, earn credibility from their employees, and make better decisions.

3. “Information cascade”: The manager needs to establish a solid briefing system to effectively pass information to supervisors and specialists. They can achieve this by using dedicated platforms such as Jira, Trello, Microsoft Teams, etc.

4. Weekly or daily team meetings with a direct manager: These 15- to 30-minute gatherings will help unite the group and ensure everyone is on the same page so that dispersed specialists actually feel like a team.

5. “Addressing the troops”: At the end of the year, the leader should address their team with a presentation on what has been achieved and what the plans for the future are so that everyone can see the bigger picture and feel part of it.

#2. Motivational skills

Establishing the vision and motivating employees to achieve it is the cornerstone of any successful project, including those that involve software development team augmentation.

People’s personalities vary, and they place different emphasis on things. Thus, to become a great leader, one needs to learn to adapt to the personalities they’re dealing with.

First, you can follow the Merrill and Reid Social Styles model suggesting that there are four types of personalities:

1. Analytical types prioritize security and prefer having a clear picture before they act.

2. Controllers are dynamic individuals delighting in solving challenging tasks.

3. Amiable types are highly motivated by the feeling of belonging and safety when they know they’re cared for.

4. Enthusiasts get inspired by the exciting vision of the future. They are socially driven, creative, and energized individuals who value when their achievements are duly recognized.

Second, when motivating your staff, you can leverage Maslow’s time-tested hierarchy of needs stating that our wants are arranged in the following order:

1. Survival level: This level isn’t relevant in the workplace as it refers to the basic survival needs, e.g. the need for food, water, and shelter.

2. Security level: The leader’s task here is to make their staff feel secure by providing them with the necessary communication and support, establishing clear rules, and being fair and steady.

3. Social level: The leader must help everyone feel part of the team. This can be done by organizing a favorable working environment suitable for networking and offering social events outside of work.

4. Status level: The leader should help their people feel recognized by entrusting them with ownership of their tasks and making sure everyone has their area of responsibility.

5. Self-actualization level: The leader needs to ensure that everyone is adequately trained and given the right opportunities and challenges to unlock their potential to the full.

For staff to be successful, everyone needs to achieve every stage in order, finishing at the level of self-actualization. Thanking your employees as often as possible will help them feel secure, recognized, and self-fulfilled.

#3. Delegation and monitoring skills

Efficient IT resource augmentation necessitates a well-developed ability to guide the staff while entrusting them with certain autonomy and adequately evaluating their performance.

The most advisable leadership styles are delegation and empowerment. They have the following pros:

• Saving the manager’s time;

• Lowering project risks by dividing responsibility among the team members;

• Encouraging learning;

• Ensuring better quality work by entrusting specialists with the ownership of tasks;

• Motivating employees by letting them overcome challenges and earn a feeling of satisfaction.

An adept leader should nurture the ability to analyze and evaluate each person’s strengths and weaknesses to understand where increased support and monitoring are required.

The ideal means of tracking progress are visual tools, such as those found in Jira, and regular meetings, such as daily stand-up meetings.

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To sum up

We can compare a team’s leader with a ship’s captain. Everything on the ship is the captain’s responsibility, from making sure that the soup isn’t too salty to ensuring that all the beds are properly made. Does the captain do all this work themselves? No, they don’t. Their responsibility is to establish smoothly running systems and appoint qualified people.

The most important thing is that one can become a strong, competent leader by nurturing and honing their skills. As John Adair put it, leadership is not about one’s personality, it’s about what they do to deserve respect and earn credibility from their teams.

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