How to be a good development team lead?

Working in quite a few companies in my professional life time and being part of a few more projects, I was lucky to have a good team lead in my starting days. With the number of projects and teams, I have liked few and not-so-much some. And if you are a lead (or aspiring to be one) , read through what a team member feels a lead should at least have in them.

1. Know your development platform
I believe a team lead is an integral part of the development group (a group of people with development skills). He/She is involved in coding and has a greater responsibility of taking critical decisions, apart from project planning and documentation work. For a developer to respect his lead, just taking is not enough. He/She has to be in line or ahead of the other members of the team. If you love talking and don't love coding, you better change you career. Those are part of marketing and sales important qualities. At our desk, we build products and not sell them. Without sales and marketing, we as a developer wouldn't have any job but if you are a talking person and not the doing person, being a lead will be a difficult task.

2. Be a part of the team, a team member

Being part of a team means more than just few words and lines, but most importantly it means putting your desk in the team space and working from that desk, :). I think the team member feel and attitude starts from that. Communication, understanding, discussions, help are few words that is part of being a team. Having your own room and working isolated from your team, tells a lot about how insecure and uninvolved you are as a lead.

3. Better working environment

A company does its best to create a good environment for all its employees to work at, but in the end its up to the the lead that make it better or worse. A recent scientific research has found that a bad boss leads to bad health and greater chance of heart attacks to its subordinates. You should always try to create a good environment for your team members to be in a good mood and concentrate on doing their assigned job better.

4. You are the lead

Sunny days and beautiful flowers are not every season. There will be times when you'll have to be hard and times when you'll have to take tuff decisions, so, you should be prepared to show that you are the lead and its for them to respect your decision. You cannot be polite every time and no way be pushed around by your members, and you must be prepared to show them that you are the lead and you are there to lead others to reach a goal.