Guide to Technical Leadership Skills

Guide to Technical Leadership Skills

Technical leaders care about building amazing products and the best technical capabilities in their teams. Everything they do is focused on improving the user experience and bringing competitive advantage for their organization. Learn the skills and competencies you need to build a technical career path for yourself that starts with building technical expertise and grows into developing technical leadership.

With any medium you are working in, technical skills obviously help, but your mind is what you really need to expand. That is how you create work. That's the role of the artist - to change the way you view things.

- Petra Collins

Technical Skills to Technical Leadership Career Path

It plays a major role in today’s businesses and building great software requires making decisions from the beginning to the end. The first responsibility of a technical leader is to define the technical strategy and decide on the technical direction the company should take. Technical leadership requires technical excellence, the business and technological context, and the ability to balance between speed, quality, and resource constraints.

Technical Leaders are those who excel and distinguish them as the most skilled and demanded professional who always acts with a high degree of professionalism. They are dedicated learners who are always committed to personal and professional development along-with pursuing a path of lifelong learning. They possess strategic thinking skills with the ability to link technology with business processes to provide quality advice for effective business solutions.

A strong leader must understand the technical details of the overall project and constantly guide the team to stay focused on the overall vision that the organization is trying to achieve. A technical leader must also have the skills to build a strong technical team, assign them meaningful work, and also track and understand the details of the work the team is doing.

How to Build Technical Leadership

Technical leadership requires technical skills as well as functional business process knowledge to gain a complete understanding of ever-changing business dynamics. They need to gain business know-how and enable their technical or functional abilities to work more efficiently and effectively while performing their role, which is to increase productivity, drive operational excellence, and ensure quality, providing better solutions to complex business problems and drive cost reduction in their respective areas.

If you are working in a modern End-to-End integrated IT-enabled enterprise, you need to gain a relevant skill-set, explore techno-functional opportunities, and showcase your expertise and experience more confidently. You should be able to anticipate and address the changing needs of clients, employers, customers, and markets well than any other professional that does not have technical expertise. You should gain substantial knowledge of the industry's most widely used enterprise resource planning tools and important related fields like SOX requirements, Six Sigma, Risks Controls and Governance, Audit of Systems, and can demonstrate this ability to integrate into the business decision process.

You should try to seek formal education to the foundation of key terms and all the key processes applicable to your domain, which will help you in a long way to understanding the business terminology and business needs. This when combined with your technical knowledge will help you in providing effective and efficient business solutions that will help you put your career on a fast track.

Guide to Technical Leadership Skills

Importance of Technical Leadership

As the number of companies is opting for automated systems to track their business operations, more and more change initiatives are undertaken by corporates. This has created an ever-increasing demand for Technical, Functional, and Techno-functional resources. There is no specialized community or portal available in the market that can assure employers and clients about the capability of these highly paid resources. The pool of credentialed talent is not keeping pace with the demand and there is no formal certification process to ensure the techno-functional they employ have the necessary skills and expertise to understand the business requirements and translate the IT Systems operating in complex business models to make then effective for business objectives.

Most of the people working on complex projects have gained their knowledge by virtue of their experience rather than going through professionally recognized formal training on how to best execute their responsibilities. There are a huge scarcity and demand for skilled techno-functional managers is at a critically urgent level. Effective technical leadership skills enable you to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate your techno-functional skills with required business, domain, and leadership skills.

Key Responsibilities of a Technical Leader

Given below are the key responsibilities that a technical leader is expected to perform in his role:

  • Defining the vision and path to achieve technical excellence and productivity for the team
  • Leading by example is very important to demonstrate technical expertise
  • Defining projects and providing technical direction
  • Focus on the big picture and ensure key deliverables are met on defined timelines
  • Providing feedback and guidance by answering the technical questions that the team might have
  • Keeping the focus on quality and establishing operational mechanisms

Explore Technofunc Toolkit for Technical Leadership

Technofunc resources aim at bridging the gap between technical and functional expertise and have invested a lot of effort into creating tutorials on various business processes and industry knowledge. Our curriculum is designed to equip a person to leverage technology as well as learn critical business application processes along-with system integrity and security, systems audit, project management, and other key methods widely used today that helps in the integration of business processes and practices in tune with the requirements that are driven both by business, globalization and legislature. We help you gain expertise in both technical and functional skills, which when applied collectively comprise of professional competence and excellence.

Given below are the different technofunc resources to start building your technical leadership skills:

Even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15% of one's financial success is due one's technical knowledge and about 85% is due to skill in human engineering, to personality and the ability to lead people.

- Dale Carnegie



Related Links

Creation Date Wednesday, 28 March 2012 Hits 16447

You May Also Like

  • Assess Your Career Values

    Assess Your Career Values

    The best career choices are ones that match your values. Each person has several values that are important to him. These values are highly personal and knowing them provides a clearer sense of what's most important to you in your life and career. Career values are the beliefs you consider important from a work standpoint. Values help you understand what you want from a job? Explore a few examples of work values that can influence career path and job satisfaction.

  • Time Management Skills

    Time Management Skills

    How often do you have a plan for how you are going to spend your day but you aren't able to complete the tasks on your plan because of unimportant tasks, interruptions, or your own procrastination? Wouldn't it be great to be able to manage your schedule and your time while avoiding, or at least controlling, these time stealers?  Learn the strategies to manage your schedule while still handling interruptions and demands on your time. 

  • Evaluating Your Career Interests

    Evaluating Your Career Interests

    Want to find out what you are best at when it comes to proactively building your career? What are your real interests? The first step in career planning is reflecting. Reflecting upon your own self, to be more self-aware, and then following your dreams with both your heart and mind. Here is an opportunity to begin exploring yourself. At the end of the process, you will have a far better understanding of your desires than you have currently.

  • Consequences of Stress

    Consequences of Stress

    A manager or an employee in an organization who is experiencing a high level of stress may develop high blood pressure, ulcers, irritability, difficulty in making routine decisions, loss of appetite, accident proneness, and the like. These can be subsumed under three general categories, physiological, psychological, and behavioral symptoms. Stress can give rise to a number of changes.

  • Discover Your Career Direction

    Discover Your Career Direction

    The process of finding career direction begins with specific career exploration and identification of a career that could be passionate about, a career that allows you to make the optimum use of your talents. After identification of the career, you need to acquire skills and tools, and education that can help you get entry into your dream career. Learn the important tips that you cannot afford to miss.

  • Building Your Domain Knowledge

    Building Your Domain Knowledge

    Domain knowledge from a career management perspective encompasses the understanding of industry dynamics and business processes of the target operational area. Domain expert exhibits clear knowledge in the respective industry and understands the industry concepts in general. It is always recommended to best highlight your exposure of domain in your resume or cover letter. TechnoFunc provides you with the best tutorials to gain domain knowledge in a large number of industries and business areas.

  • Tips for Career Progression

    Tips for Career Progression

    Navigating your career journey will hopefully include a series of experiences that challenge your skills and abilities in ways that are satisfying and rewarding. Only you can manage your career. That means you must determine what things you are passionate about, what your goals are, both professionally and personally, and how much energy you are willing to invest along the way. Learn how to build an effective career path framework for yourself.

  • Top Management Skills

    Top Management Skills

    In today's business world, proficiency in management skills is essential for career growth and success. Managerial skills can be defined as attributes or abilities that are essential for every leader and manager to succeed and fulfill specific tasks expected from them by the organization.

  • Transform IT Role

    Transform IT Role

    Technology represents tremendous value if you view it from the proper perspective. IT empowerment also has its various levels in any organization. As a CIO or IT Senior Leader, you should try to move the technology function up the value chain. Learn how to transform your service delivery organization being looked upon as another cost center to a business partner that provides valuable services and brings competitive advantage for the business.

  • Reasons behind Wastage of Time

    Reasons behind Wastage of Time

    Under-utilization of time may be due to the faulty system or faults of manager/officer/leader or due to lack of planning. There could be many factors driving the procrastination behavior like system issues, personal work habits, and lack of delegation, personality traits, and bad working habits of the leader, failure to tackle interpersonal conflicts, obstacles, and lack of far-sightedness.

Explore Our Free Training Articles or
Sign Up to Start With Our eLearning Courses

Subscribe to Our Newsletter


© 2023 TechnoFunc, All Rights Reserved