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Leading Your First Team

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Beginner content levelBeginner

For first-time leads, player-coaches, and accidental managers

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Identify and apply key mindset shifts when transitioning from IC to team lead
  • Run structured and effective 1:1 meetings that build trust and surface issues early
  • Deliver clear, actionable feedback in both everyday and difficult situations
  • Delegate work appropriately to balance team ownership and avoid micromanagement

Course description

Stepping into a team lead role requires more than being good at the work itself. High performers are often promoted into leadership (or asked to take on more leadership responsibility) without clear guidance on how to manage people, set direction, or support team performance. As a result, many new or “accidental” leaders struggle with the shift from doing the work themselves to enabling others to succeed.

In this concise, fast-paced course, Anemari Fiser leads you through the fundamental skills you need to operate effectively as a new lead with direct people responsibilities, including running structured 1:1 meetings, giving clear and actionable feedback, and delegating work without micromanaging. You’ll also explore how to handle common situations such as underperformance, miscommunication, and unclear priorities. Through reflection, discussion, and scenario-based exercises, you’ll practice applying these skills in realistic contexts. By the end of the course, you’ll have a set of practical tools and frameworks you can use immediately to support your team and grow into your role as a leader.

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a senior individual contributor transitioning into a team lead, manager, or player-coach role.
  • You’re being asked to take on more team leadership or management responsibility without formal authority or title.
  • You work closely with peers in a team setting and want to lead them more effectively.
  • You want to become a team lead or are already in the role and figuring it out as you go.

Prerequisites

  • Experience working as an individual contributor in a team environment
  • Prior exposure to team collaboration and shared ownership of work
  • Some experience mentoring others, leading projects, or taking on informal leadership responsibilities (helpful but not required)

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

The shift from IC to team lead (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Key differences between IC and team lead responsibilities; redefining success (output versus impact); introducing “accidental leaders” (taking on leadership responsibilities without formal authority or title) and their unique challenges
  • Group discussion: What makes the transition to team lead most challenging for you?
  • Hands-on exercise: Identify tasks to stop, delegate, or continue as a team lead; capture examples on a shared whiteboard
  • Q&A

Running effective 1:1s and building trust (40 minutes)

  • Group discussion: What most often makes 1:1s ineffective?
  • Presentation: Structure of effective 1:1s; active listening; building trust and psychological safety; common mistakes
  • Hands-on exercise: Plan your next 1:1 with a real team member using a simple agenda template; replace weak 1:1 questions (e.g., “Everything okay?”) with more effective, open-ended questions
  • Q&A
  • Break

Feedback and difficult conversations (60 minutes)

  • Group discussion: Which best describes your current approach to feedback?
  • Presentation: Principles of clear, actionable feedback; common pitfalls; situation-behavior-impact (SBI) framework; handling underperformance and difficult conversations
  • Hands-on exercises: Plan a real piece of feedback you need to deliver (or recently delivered) using a simple structure; given a short real-world situation, write one or two sentences of feedback
  • Q&A
  • Break

Delegation and prioritization (40 minutes)

  • Group discussion: What’s preventing you from delegating right now?
  • Presentation: What to delegate; avoiding micromanagement; managing time and priorities as a lead; introducing a delegation process to address common challenges
  • Hands-on exercise: Build a delegation plan for a real task or responsibility you want to delegate, following a clear step-by-step delegation process; add what the risk is if you don’t delegate
  • Q&A

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

  • Presentation: A “New Team Lead Toolkit,” including templates for 1:1s, feedback, and delegation process
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Anemari Fiser

    Anemari Fiser is a tech leadership coach and trainer who helps engineers grow into confident, people-centered tech leads. She’s the author of Leveling Up as a Tech Lead and the creator of the Soft Skills for Tech Leads course, both for O’Reilly. With over a decade of experience in the tech industry, she has held roles from software engineer to engineering leader. As an independent coach and trainer, Anemari has worked with 500+ engineers and trained 400+ tech leads across different organizations worldwide. She also shares practical leadership insights with a community of 30,000 tech professionals on LinkedIn.

Skills covered

  • Team Management
  • Communication Strategy
  • Organizational Leadership
  • Professional Communication