Engineers skills evolve over time and can be taught. But what makes good engineers special is how they approach the work and react to what motivates them. A successful team needs a leader that can identify what matters to the members and can create an environment where the most can be produced.
Look into your team for the ones with these behaviors.
The one that is about going fast.
You will spot them enjoying showing their work. The faster they can demo it, the better. By the time others finish scaffolding, this is one is showing you what he has done.
Their weakness: Details and quality. If let unmanaged, the mess will be overwhelming.
Put them in the front and let them turn ideas into tangibles. Do not hold them back or put too many rules around them. Instead surround them with a structure that can fill the gaps without creating frustrations in the rest of the team.
The one that is about doing right.
Well organized teams, orderly development and code quality are inspiration. Lint like tools are their favorites and they produce code for others to understand.
Overuse of abstraction will be their weakness. They may struggle to focus on the concrete.
Setup an environment that let them process and prioritize while verifying with other engineers. Keep them away for prototypes and let them shine in the inner workings of the product.
The one that is about going deep.
Their passion is to solve the big and obscure problems. You can identify them for being the one that approach software and framework by understanding how they work rather than by what they do.
They get in trouble by getting lost in the depths of the problems they want to solve. They need support to understand how much is too much.
Focus on qualitative instead of quantitative measurement. Avoid simple and shallow problems. Instead set them up with ambitious but realistic goals.
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