I am a People and Culture person for a medium sized tech company (300 developers). We have the usual turnover most tech companies have so are constantly replacing people.
One of the challenges we face is in replacing software and machine learning team leads. They leave just as often as anyone else. We usually start by offering the position to a member of the existing team, but 8 times out of 10, they decline.
While we can hire candidates externally, the lack of leadership by the engineers also shows through here. They usually are not up to speed and the engineers seem willing to let them make mistakes and take projects in disastrous directions. One exec sat in a meeting where the engineers let a team lead completely misunderstand who the customer was for the project and set project goals which made no sense but they went along with anyway.
We have had a few utterly disastrous projects because a new team lead misunderstood something, nobody really tried to correct him, and this went on for months with the engineers at most offering small corrections and if that was not heard or was ignored the first time around, just going with it.
I am not an engineer, so I am mostly just repeating notes and a few of my own observations, but I have been tasked with solving this.
Any ideas? Ideally we want them to lead the teams as they know about the products and the engineering considerations. But even if they do not we would like them to be less passive.