Team leading is hard. It is important not to fool yourself that it will be all about the technology and that you won’t have to deal with the dynamics and personalities within the team. Your team may be made up of highly professional, highly skilled and highly experienced individuals, but fundamentally it is a team of people. Someone, somewhere, maybe even you, has made you the team leader. It may be because you were the first member of the team, because you are the most experienced, because you are the most highly skilled or for some other equally valid reason. Whatever the reason, don’t set yourself above your team. You are still one of the members of your team. Listen to your team and speak to them as another member of the team, Don’t expect people to blindly follow just because you’re the leader. Your team may be full of highly professional people, but don’t assume that means they don’t need to understand the reasons when asked to do something, even by somebody ‘superior’ to them. E