A great leader is the key to success. However, being a great leader has always been challenging, especially in today’s world, where technology plays a crucial role in business, making leadership and management more complex than ever. This is particularly true for leaders in tech organizations that evolve rapidly. Whether you’re a CEO of a tech company, a CTO, or a tech team leader, these qualities are essential.
As a tech company, Sertis wants to share with readers the 10 essential qualities that great tech leaders must possess, in order to drive growth and success to their teams and organizations while advancing the business.
1. Ability to Plan and Deliver Quality Work
The most important quality of great tech leaders is the ability to plan and manage to deliver quality work. This includes budgeting, project management, task delegation, and technical planning. Therefore, skilled tech leaders must possess bothin-depth technical knowledge and management skills.
2. Good Communication Skills
Tech leaders, such as CTOs or tech company CEOs, need to interact, communicate, and negotiate with a variety of people, including employees, clients, and other executives. They must be able to convey business or technical matters in ways that suit the nature and needs of each audience group. Excellent communication skills are crucial for managing interactions with all stakeholders.
3. Listening to the Team and Accepting Failure
Great tech leaders must pay attention to and listen to their team members, understanding their strengths, weaknesses, priorities, and working styles. This is crucial for managing the team effectively and achieving desired goals. At the same time, they must accept failures, even when falling short of expectations, and encourage teams to work together to find solutions and improvements.
4. Avoiding Micromanagement and Promoting Managing Up
While great tech leaders should manage the overall work of the team or organization, they must avoid micromanaging. Trusting the team and allowing space for each team to manage their own work is crucial. They should also regularly engage with employees outside the management team, encouraging them to share feedback for development and identify shortcomings. This promotes managing up and makes employees feel heard.
5. Ability to Make Decisions Under Pressure
In the fast-paced tech world, organizations must keep up with changes. Great tech leaders should be able to make quick and sharp decisions on complex matters under pressure, even with incomplete information. This requires analytical thinking and foresight. They must also ensure that decisions remain within reasonable risk limits. This way, they can recover quickly from setbacks without significant damage.
6. Keeping Up with Trends
New tech trends can emerge overnight, and technologies continuously evolve. Great tech leaders must stay updated with these trends and keep their teams informed. Additionally, staying aware of market trends and global changes is essential, as everything is interconnected. Understanding the bigger picture helps in strategic planning.
7. Encouraging Creativity, Experiment, and Learning
The core of technological advancement is the willingness to innovate, experiment, and learn. Great tech leaders should foster creativity and encourage the team to explore and learn new things. They must also be open to new ideas that contribute to team growth and create a safe space for trial and error, encouraging the team to accept and learn from failures.
8. Embracing Change as an Opportunity
The tech world moves twice as fast as the rest of the world. Great tech leaders should view change positively, embracing it as an opportunity. They should believe that obstacles are opportunities to improve quality. This mindset is developed through experience and can help overcome the natural fear of change.
9. Firmness and Decisiveness
Conflicts or unreasonable demands often arise in the workplace, whether from external parties like clients or the other teams in the organization. Great tech leaders need to discern what is reasonable and aligned with business goals while firmly and professionally rejecting unreasonable demands, tight deadlines, or impractical strategies. Effective communication and persuasion are essential to maintain good relationships and protect the team.
10. Acknowledging That They Don’t Know Everything
Even experienced tech leaders must remind themselves that they don’t know everything. No matter how experienced or knowledgeable they are in technology, there will always be someone who knows more about certain topics. They should be open to learning from others. They should manage effectively by leveraging the expertise of those around them to fill gaps and ensure the best outcomes.
At Sertis, we have a team of tech experts in various roles who are ready to learn and grow with the evolving tech world and create solutions that maximize benefits for all clients.
Learn more about Sertis solutions at: https://www.sertiscorp.com/solutions
