The skills a lead actually leans on

This is an inventory rather than a curriculum. Nobody is strong across all of it, and the useful exercise is to read down the table and mark the two rows that would change the most if they improved this quarter.

Skills grouped by the accountability they serve
Group	Skill	What good looks like
Direction	Framing	Can state the problem in a sentence that the team and a stakeholder both recognise.
Direction	Sequencing	Can say what is being done first and what is being consciously deferred.
Judgement	Tradeoff articulation	Can name what a decision costs, not only what it buys.
Judgement	Reading a system	Can find the load-bearing part of an unfamiliar codebase without a tour.
Judgement	Writing it down	Decisions survive the person who made them.
People	Delegation	Hands over work that is slightly too big, and stays available.
People	Direct feedback	Says the awkward thing early, in private, and specifically.
People	Listening	Can repeat back an objection well enough that its owner agrees with the summary.

Reading the inventory

Two patterns come up often enough to be worth naming. The first is a lead strong across judgement and weak across direction, which produces a team that makes excellent decisions about work of uncertain value. The second is the reverse: a clear direction that the team cannot execute because the technical tradeoffs were never made explicit. Both are fixable, and neither is fixed by working longer hours.

Working on one row

Pick a single row, decide what you would do differently in the next four weeks, and choose in advance what would count as evidence that it changed. That structure is the whole of the method; the rest is repetition.