Self-care

Your worst behaviour sets the low bar for your teams. Protect your team by protecting yourself.

Leading a team of developers is an exciting and privileged job but it can be hard on you. It's especially difficult when you are leading a team for the first time.

One challenge is that we often see leadership as a form of heroism: being a leader means being the best at what you do, it means knowing everything. There are many problems with this:

• People who think they know it all are poor performers. There is some fascination in pop culture (think of how we represent geniuses in movies) with people that have all the answers, so it does reflect in our everyday assessment and biases. The goal of a good leader, though, isn't to be a know-it-all. The goal is to be as helpful as possible. We're all juniors at almost everything we do, so it's more beneficial to focus on how to face problems while learning and how to teach other people to do the same.
• Some developers do expect their leaders to be the best developers in their team. A leader must be better than them, right? Well, no. It just paints a wrong picture of what leadership is.

If you are in this trap, you end up isolating yourself from the team, because you can't ask for help when in need. The "best" do it all alone, don't they?

You can guess why I'm quoting these words. Being the "best" at something doesn't mean much unless you're taking part in an actual competition. Isolation isn't a solution. Vulnerability is. The rest of the chapter expands on this.

To care for others, you have to care for yourself. As much as I don't like how cliché this sounds, it's true. You need enough personal space so you learn how to protect yourself from your own sense of responsibility towards your teams. At times, it's hard to remember that. After all, a job is just a job. You are much more than just your job; if you don't take care of yourself, no one else will.