For me, I was only able to learn through experience, but hopefully my experiences can help you avoid my mistakes. My first lead opportunity at my first company

For me, I was only able to learn through experience, but hopefully my experiences can help you avoid my mistakes. My first lead opportunity at my first company was about 2 years in. It was a 12 or so person company, and all positions were flat except for the owner. When I was promoted, I considered my new main goal in life was to improve efficiency. While true to a point, I decided that the way I was to improve efficiency was to start tracking every piece of work performed. I created elaborate tools to allow everyone to check-in their time, and built amazing executive reports to interpret this data. However, efficiency (or rather actual work being done) was dropping. Identifying this as a failure on the team's part, over the period of a year, I implemented a series of changes ranging from good cop stuff (take the guys out for team-building) to bad cop stuff (threaten pay-cuts, firings etc..) Later at a new company, the opportunity presented itself, and I was sure I had figured it out this time. Around this same time, I was really into design patterns and diagramming. In fact, I felt as though every problem in life could be distilled down to a pattern. Every member of my team could fit into nice little diagrams as boxes, and the work would get done like magic. A designer was a designer, and programmer was a programmer. Everyone and everything was interchangeable. We could outsource work when we needed it, and get rid of people when we didn't. A bit later at a different company, I was able to give leading a third try. Around this time, I was reading a lot of joelonsoftware, and randsinrepose. Instead of implementing anything, I decided to just try to eliminate obstacles for my team. I started weekly 1 on 1 meetings with my guys, allowing them to talk about anything they wanted for as long as needed. Lastly, I just tried to be the guy that I wanted my guys to be. I made a conscious effort to keep my morale up, not let things get to me, and lead by example. Looking back, I see that in the first two, I was trying to implement things that motivated me. I love analytics and treating tasks as games. I love seeing charts go upward. However, management is about your people, not you. People are emotional and complex. This sounds pretty cliche as I write it, but try to improve yourself as a person, encourage that in your team, and the productivity / efficiency / whatever will take care of itself. Good luck!