Team Leadership: How to Be an Effective Team Leader

A team leader is a professional who offers high-level vision, guidance, inspiration, and values to the group of people they supervise. They do not necessarily oversee a company’s day-to-day operations (that role usually falls to a team manager). Instead, team leadership roles focus on team building, establishing interpersonal relationships, mentoring, and uniting a successful team toward a common purpose. An effective leader of a team plays an important role within the broader structure of an organization.

Effective team leaders take on a great number of duties within their job description.

1. 1. Establishing culture: Effective leadership starts with setting expectations, naming company values, and holding all parties to account. Team leaders establish a team culture or an overall company culture to set a template for all who work there.
2. 2. Promoting teamwork: Team leaders unite stakeholders toward common goals. Great leaders balance team performance with the needs of the team’s individual members.
3. 3. High-level decision-making: Companies task their leaders with tackling big issues. Together with top management, team leaders set goals and confront high-order problem-solving
4. 4. Delegating work to others: An effective team leader must delegate tasks to their direct reports, trusting them to use their best judgment as they pursue team goals.
5. 5. Communicating: Team leaders communicate with all of their direct reports, whether one-on-one or via intermediaries. They host team meetings where they lay out objectives, report on success metrics like profitability and growth, and solicit feedback from their employees. Some team leaders hold these meetings on a daily basis.
6. 6. Facilitating employee performance: Effective team leadership requires leaders to recognize how specific employees’ core competencies can positively impact organizational goals and initiatives. Ineffective leaders do not make proper use of their workers’ skill sets, which can slow the company and frustrate the employees. By noting, and making use of, workers’ true competencies, great leaders can advance their company and improve working relationships.
7. 7. Helping others grow: Self-confident team leaders also assist other workers’ own leadership development. They seek to train new generations of talent who can help their organization grow and thrive.

Successful team leaders possess an impressive array of leadership skills. They include:

1. 1. Communication: Excellent communication skills are a hallmark of great leaders. Employees like to know where they stand within a company, and they like to track the progress of the company at large. A good team leader keeps them apprised of such matters. This style of leadership establishes sharing information as a company value. That, in turn, can promote greater trust and stronger team dynamics.
2. 2. Emotional intelligence: Great team leaders respect their direct reports as human beings with their own needs and their own ambitions. Emotional intelligence allows them to balance individual needs with team performance to make stakeholders feel heard but to also keep them on task. This leadership approach can boost employee engagement as well as the company’s employee retention.
3. 3. Deescalation skills: Team leaders are often masters of conflict resolution. By combining their own constructive, empathetic qualities with help from a human resources department, they can make employees feel heard, stave off conflict, and promote a harmonious workplace.
4. 4. Time management skills: Many team leaders face enormous demands over the course of their workday and workweek. These competing interests will call upon the leader’s time management skills. Leaders must balance their meeting schedule, their check-ins, and their own personal productivity as they seek to steer their department or organization.

The role of a team leader is not quite the same as that of a team manager. Here are the key differences:

• Team managers oversee day-to-day operations. A manager interacts with employees on a near-daily basis. They keep track of operations throughout their department, they make employee work schedules, they manage budgets, and they use strategic planning to work toward their company’s high-level goals.
• Team leaders focus more on the big picture. If a team manager delves more into the granular details of daily operations, a team leader steers more toward broad objectives, long term goal-setting, team inspiration, and employee empowerment. In smaller organizations, a team leader may double as a manager. Later, if the company is fortunate enough to grow, it may hire a manager to help actualize the leader’s strategic vision.

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