15-09-2025
10 tips to develop your team leaders
Engineering business owners must make all the decisions themselves when they create their company.
However, as their business expands and they employ more people they can end up being overloaded with tasks that could be carried out more effectively by other people if they keep insisting on making all the decisions themselves.
To free up their time to focus on the growth of their business, they must change their mindset from telling everyone what to do to getting people to make their own decisions.
The first step is to create a structure of people leading small teams. These people may already be in the business, or they may have to be recruited externally.
Developing your team leaders
However, simply promoting or appointing team leaders and expecting them to lead their team without support or guidance is unlikely to work.
Too many times, have I seen CEOs promoting their most experienced or most skilled people to team leading positions only to be disappointed when they still end up having to make all the decisions themselves.
A few tips
Here are a few tips to develop your team leaders based on my own experience. I don’t pretend that they will all be relevant to your situation, but I hope you will find some of them useful.
- Write down and communicate what you expect your team leaders to do, including their duties and responsibilities as well as their authority.
- Make clear they understand that their top priority is to develop their team.
- Ensure that they make themselves available at short notice when requested by their team members (whether it is related to their work or to deal with personal issues).
- Dedicate time every week to talk to your direct reports, listening to them, providing guidance, defining expectations and asking for feedback.
- Avoid making decisions in place of your team leaders when they ask for guidance but instead keep asking questions to help them come up with their own solution.
- Do not short circuit your team leaders when you talk to their teams directly. This certainly does not mean you should avoid direct contact with their team members but when you do you should keep the team leader informed.
- Use your team leaders to disseminate information such as general announcements and ask them to get feedback from their teams.
- Make sure team leaders take part in the salary review process. Having defined the rules of engagement, ask them to recommend salary reviews for their team members. Obviously this does not preclude you from making the final decision.
- Inform team leaders of the rationale behind final decisions and ask them to communicate the outcome of salary reviews individually to their team members.
- Make sure team leaders participate actively to the recruitment process as appropriate such as defining roles, reviewing CVs, interviewing and recommending whether to make an offer.
Help
These are just a few tips based on my experience. They are not meant to be universal or exhaustive and they may not all be appropriate for your business.
However, I hope you will find them useful to stimulate ideas and develop your own approach.
I work with overstretched leaders of Engineering SMEs to help them prepare their business so they can achieve profitable growth.
To discuss your specific challenges and explore how I could help you, please use the link below to arrange a free 30-minute conversation.