---
aliases: ["Team Leadership"]
Is A: Topic
---
# Team Leadership

Team leadership covers the art and practice of managing small teams — running effective 1:1s, giving and receiving feedback, building culture in remote and async environments, and making decisions about structure and process that help people do their best work. It is both a daily practice in managing the Refactoring team and a core editorial topic for the newsletter.

## Why this matters

Team leadership is arguably the single most important topic for the Refactoring audience. Engineering managers, tech leads, and VPs of engineering are all navigating the same fundamental challenge: how to get the best out of a group of talented, autonomous people without creating bureaucracy. The experience of managing [[person-matteo-cellini]], [[person-paco-furiani]], and [[person-sara-ricci]] provides firsthand material for writing on this topic, and the evergreen note [[small-teams-scale-through-systems]] captures the core philosophy. This topic connects directly to [[responsibility-team-management]] on the operational side.

## Key resources

- [[small-teams-scale-through-systems]] — the principle that systems and processes enable small teams to punch above their weight
- [[note-good-strategy-bad-strategy]] — strategic clarity at the team level prevents wasted effort
- [[note-deep-work]] — protecting the team's focus time is a leadership responsibility, not just a personal one
- "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier — the definitive guide for engineering management at every level
- "An Elegant Puzzle" by Will Larson — systems thinking applied to engineering organization design

## Notes

- The most impactful thing a leader of a small team can do is remove ambiguity — when everyone knows what matters this week and why, execution follows naturally
- 1:1s are the highest-ROI meeting a manager has, and the most common mistake is using them for status updates instead of coaching and relationship building
- Remote teams need more intentional communication rituals, not more meetings — async defaults with periodic sync touchpoints work better than constant video calls
- Feedback is a muscle that atrophies if not exercised regularly; the best teams normalize feedback as a routine part of collaboration, not a high-stakes annual event
- Scaling a team from 3 to 10 people is a qualitatively different challenge than starting with 3 — the communication overhead grows non-linearly, and the leader's role shifts from doing to enabling
