Leading by Example: What It Takes to Be a Successful Team Lead

As our team keeps growing, with more people getting hired every week, some will be promoted as “heads” or “team leads.”

Someone on our team (who’s incredibly dedicated, by the way) mentioned that if she’s promoted to a team lead position, other team members will start taking her more seriously.

However, it’s important to note that it’s never the “title” that makes anyone take someone seriously…

What actually matters is leading by example.
(So, even without a title you’re able to make an impact if you’re doing the right thing)

If you want others to follow you and do a certain task, are you able to show them, through your documented example, how you’re doing all the right things instead of just pointing out how they’re doing all the wrong things?

Having team leads specializing in different areas is fantastic for keeping everything moving smoothly and improving overall team efficiency.

But someone who’s leading by example, and is “leading,” is no longer just responsible for their own work — they are accountable for everyone else working under them.

For example, someone who’s a team lead for video processing should:

• Be able to QA their own work and others’ work (which also means, their own concepts about how we do things, should be very clear — which is often not the case, though easy to fix.)
  
• Stay on top of everything, ensuring the Sheets tracking all assets are up-to-date and error-free.
  
• Be able to check if the videos being processed and uploaded to YouTube are properly QA’d using the appropriate checklist (e.g., no missing hooks, no generic titles, appropriate branding).
  
• Know how to check if the videos’ titles and descriptions actually reflect a deep understanding of the content.
  
• Avoid basic errors, like spelling mistakes in the names of our clients (this happens more often than you’d think) or creating meaningless thumbnails with mutilated photos (e.g., limbs cut off).
  
• Be careful about the videos that contain client content and internal videos that shouldn’t be processed.

By being careful, I mean understanding what confidentiality is. Some clients give permission for their content to be public; some don’t.

We should be able to identify which ones we have consent for and handle this ourselves without waiting for someone else to tell us — because everything in the sheets is open for any vigilant team member to understand.

These things can easily improve when everyone actually watches the videos they’re processing and understands them. The stronger you get with the core concepts, the easier it is to write proper titles and descriptions.

A team lead should remember how important this is so the ones following them don’t think it’s okay to make mistakes that later result in “damage at scale”.

The great thing about everything I just said is that all of this has been repeated many times and is available to watch and learn in the thousands of training videos created by Dennis.

A consistent will to improve, vowing not to rely on others for QA, and being truly sincere are some of the things that matter, if you want to level up quickly at BlitzMetrics.