--- title: "9 Solid Tips To Grow Your Team’s Talent in a Year" description: "“I have no time to grow my teammates. We have to deliver.” 9 practical moves to grow your team's talent in a year without dropping delivery." url: "https://www.marian.coach/blog/9-solid-tips-to-grow-your-teams-talent-in-a-year/" lang: "en" image: "https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/9-solid-tips-to-grow-your-teams-talent-in-a-year.webp" --- ![9 Solid Tips To Grow Your Team’s Talent in a Year](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/9-solid-tips-to-grow-your-teams-talent-in-a-year.webp) ![Hand-drawn diagram Growing others in the team: Team 1 has a dominant lead circle, Team 2 grown members](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-archive/2023/08/image-32.webp)The role of a team leader is not to be the most experienced person in a team. That doesn’t scale. ## Situation > “I have no time to grow my teammates. We have to deliver. > > … I can’t keep up with the pace anymore.” _?_ This is a scenario I keep hearing from people in [a team lead role](https://www.marian.coach/team-lead-role-vs-tech-lead-vs-engineering-manager/). ## Exploration ? Imagine a complementary example you could experience: a team lead is leveled up to [the Head of Development role](https://www.marian.coach/head-of-engineering-role/). The promotion is well-deserved after all their achievements in the technical field. Their team also seems to work efficiently, delivering on time. Nevertheless, the novice 2nd-level manager has a hard time surviving. Why? Their old teammates keep banging on their door to get answers or approval for almost every detail, swallowing ~ 40% of their time ?. What’s the right move? Usually, it comes down to seeing things from a higher perspective. If you are in a similar situation, you might be asking: - _➡️ “How do you develop the talent around you? How much time do you allocate to it and how?”_ - _➡️ “What’s the team’s success rate regarding the delivery of sprints as planned? How much of the delivery is built by yourself in the team lead role?”_ ## Awakening moment ? Any leader can hire people. A good leader hires talent. A great leader cultivates talent. You are a hero. A bright and experienced developer in the team you lead. You ensure 99.99% of commitments are delivered, building 3/4 of the code on your own. You have high credibility. Life is great. While it’s true and feels great, there might be a different perception: If anything bad happens to you, the progress drops to zero. Effectively, **you are a bottleneck**. People are waiting for your 2nd level code reviews and your technical decisions. They have little space to improve, as all ideas go through your approval. To ensure delivery, you keep the beefy and meaty pieces for yourself. Others are helping you with more minor features, bug fixes, or tests. They seem not to be taken care of, anyway. When it comes to dedicating more time to others, there is not much space left. We have to deliver. ![A mentor and an engineering leader in a 1:1 at a round table, talking across the mentoring zone sign.](https://www.marian.coach/_astro/mentoring-07.CaYSBaNE_X1W5R.webp) Growing talent starts with a real conversation, not a review cycle. Ask yourself and your manager what is more beneficial for you and the company’s success in the long run: to deploy 1-2 more features or to spend more time educating 1-2 promising individual contributors who will end up boosting your productivity down the road? You might want to change your perception of measuring triumph and start gaining personal satisfaction from the number of successful releases owned by other people on the team than you. ![Sketch of a leader's decision model: nine balance scales weighing the lead against room for team members to grow](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-archive/2023/08/image-33.webp)A true leader will override another person’s opinion in 1 out of 9 scenarios. The tricky part is to acknowledge the B3 and C2 options. ## Action: build a plan ? 1. **Identify the talent** around you. Give it a chance. Multiple times, I witnessed a quiet person or a part-time junior student turn into a team hero in 6 months. Could you give them a hand? **Tell them openly that you see a high potential in them** and things will change. 2. **Delegate**. I know, the art of delegation is the most challenging part. It’s not about dropping things off our radar. **Delegation equals growing others.** The best starting point is to delegate ownership of a specific release or outcome end-to-end, from talking to a product manager or a stakeholder to deployment and feature adoption. Ownership translates to being responsible for the success of the delivery, **not** to building the whole scope as a single person. A team lead pays attention to the progress and openly articulates the message “I’m here to help you all the way”. Be it slicing, grooming, or technical advisory. 3. To make your team **more efficient in the long run**, embrace the fact that this new approach will slow down delivery a bit for a couple of months or a year until new talent comes to fruition. 4. That is why you might want to adjust the **delivery throughput**, providing more space for personal growth: Who’s chasing your team to deliver 42 story points on a sprint basis? You and only your team are. You might also come to an agreement to dedicate every second Wednesday to learning, knowledge-sharing, mentoring, or any side-project work. 5. What other practical options do you have? Delegate epics. Ask a senior person in your group to personally support a junior student. That move gives them a signal of trust and ultimately boosts the team’s spirit. Pay attention to **grooming sessions** to ensure the technical design is valid, and the initiative is well-sliced. Prevent overly complex or uncertain issues from entering a sprint! Another neat trick is asking all epic owners to come up with **technical and slicing** **proposals** before grooming. 6. **Coach**. Don’t advise right away. Solutions suggested by others have a low footprint in peoples’ minds (see the pic above ⬆️). 7. If you have to step down to the code to get things back on track, **don’t do it on your own**. You’d break the principle of ownership, and nobody will sign up for it next time. **Pair. Mob.** 8. A tricky part is to **allow people to make mistakes** that are not critical. Let’s say you see 1-2 potential edge cases, inexpensive bugs that won’t get covered, or a piece of code that’ll have to get refactored to a better structure. Should you raise your hand? 9. After you have built such a plan, talk to **your manager**. They’ll most certainly congratulate you. Challenge them. ## Growth environment ? You are not alone in boosting the company’s learning and growing environment. In addition to the tips above, there’s a whole ecosystem we can build: - Specific [personal development plans tied to career ladders](https://www.marian.coach/blog/11-keys-to-mastering-performance-reviews/) - [Dedicated innovation days](https://www.marian.coach/blog/innovation-days-transforming-ideas-to-product/) - Open learning/reading Slack channels - Cross-exposures - Free lunch and learn sessions - [Internal and external mentoring](https://www.marian.coach/mentor-in-residence/) - Personal brand building by blog posting and speaking at meetups or podcasts - Manager education - Having leaders worth following ![Marian Kamenistak walking the mDevCamp stage in front of a large pink-lit conference backdrop.](https://www.marian.coach/_astro/talk-05.G5yrumUC_t0JiK.webp) Speaking about growing talent instead of hoarding it. It seems like this type of overview might be an excellent topic for the next blog post. What are your thoughts and experience of being a 1st-time leader? ## Frequently asked How do I develop my team members' skills?+ Start by naming the talent out loud: tell the person you see high potential in them. Then delegate ownership of a full release end to end, from talking to the product manager through to deployment and adoption. Ownership means responsibility for the delivery, not building all of it alone. How do I grow my team when we still have to deliver?+ Cut the delivery throughput deliberately and give the freed time to growth, for example every second Wednesday for learning and mentoring. Expect delivery to slow for a couple of months or a year until new talent comes through. Ask your manager which is worth more: two more features, or two contributors who boost your productivity later. What is the role of a team leader in growing talent?+ A team leader's job is not to be the most experienced person in the room, because that does not scale. If you build three quarters of the code yourself, you are the bottleneck: people wait on your reviews and your decisions, and they have no room to improve. How often should a leader override someone else's decision?+ A leader should override another person's opinion in roughly one out of nine situations. The other eight are room for someone else to decide and to learn. Coaching beats advice here, because a solution somebody works out themselves leaves a far deeper mark than one they were handed. [1:1 mentoring](https://www.marian.coach/engineering-manager-mentor/) ## Ready to move this from advice to action? 1:1 mentoring for engineering leaders. 317 mentees since 2019. Rate a session under 7/10 and you don't pay for it. First intro is free. [Book a free 30-min intro →](https://www.marian.coach/meet) ## Read next - [![VP of Engineering @ Mews - A look back on my 1st year](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog-covers/vp-of-engineering-mews-a-look-back-on-my-1st-year.webp) ### VP of Engineering @ Mews - A look back on my 1st year Life is fun! Joining a new company in April 2020 couldn’t have been easier: The Prague HQ office got closed due to the virus whose name we shall not mentio… 30 June 2021 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/blog/vp-of-engineering-mews-a-look-back-on-my-1st-year/) - [![A mentor and an engineering leader in a 1:1 at a round table, talking across the mentoring zone sign.](https://www.marian.coach/_astro/mentoring-07.CaYSBaNE_Z29eHul.webp) ### Engineering Manager Role: What You Own, What You Hand Over What is an engineering manager? The role, its real responsibilities, what a senior engineer hands over in the move, and four ways year one goes wrong. 9 October 2026 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/engineering-manager-role/) - [![Hand-drawn loop: the North Star, set for 12-18 months, leads to 3-5 customer areas, then to team OKRs, then to your work. A green arrow labelled quarterly review runs from your work back to the North Star.](https://www.marian.coach/images/blog/team-charter-guide/infographic.webp) ### Team Charter Guide for Software Engineering Teams How to write a team charter for a software engineering team: 18 Confluence pages, from North Star and customer-area KPIs to Done, each with a worked example. 22 September 2026 · By Marian Read → ](https://www.marian.coach/blog/team-charter-guide/) ### New posts, straight to your inbox. Your emailSubscribe You're on it. Nothing hits your inbox today. First send goes out once the list is live, and you're already on it. 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