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Given that most organisations increasingly work to a team model, a manager’s role as team leader is crucial. The success of a team and its effectiveness is influenced by the quality and skill of the person who leads it. The value that a team and its work add to the overall success of an organisation is influenced by the role of the leader whose job it is to manage the team. You can learn more about how leaders influence and motivate their team on our  Leadership Skills Course.

What makes an effective team leader?

As with all aspects of management, the styles used by individual team leaders vary. Some may be more task oriented (their main concern is to get the job done) or more people oriented (their main concern is to ensure that people work well together). There is also a distinction between being predominately developmental (seeing human resources primarily as an investment) or predominately conservative (seeing them primarily as a cost).

Leadership style was characterised in the work of John Adair on leadership in 1970’s; work which has been influential in this field ever since. In what he calls Action Centred Leadership, he sees the activity of team leadership as a trinity comprising:

INDIVIDUALS
GROUP
TASK

The ideal team manager takes all three aspects into account all of the time and achieves balance between them constantly. Realistically, this is difficult to sustain permanently! There will be times when there is a target to meet so the task takes priority and if you have a good enough relationship with your team they will be prepared to put in the hours until the job is done! At other times, an individual member of the team may need special support and attention or the needs of the group as a whole have to come to the fore. Thus your focus will shift depending on the circumstance but you must never lose sight of the other two aspects completely and you must bring the situation into balance as soon as you can.

Building High Performance Teams

All leaders want to build high-performance teams and whilst all teams are different, there are certain common characteristics which contribute to high-performing teams. They:

• Share and subscribe to the leader’s vision
• Demonstrate keenness to succeed
• Are motivated by their goal
• Members show commitment to each other, the leader and the goal
• Set and achieve challenging targets which are reviewed regularly
• Members have mature interpersonal relationships which demonstrate trust, openness and respect
• Get satisfaction from what they do
• Learn and move on from failure

How Appropriate is your Style of Leading the Team?

“Self awareness is central to being a successful leader”
Kouzes & Posner, The Future of Leadership, 2001

Understanding your preferred leadership style is important. It also helps to understand the effect your style has on others and when it is most effective. In today’s complex and changing business environment, it is more important to be able to adapt and vary the style to suit the people involved and the prevailing business climate.

Most of us will have a preference for one style over another so what is yours?

Basic principles of leadership

Leadership exists in all walks of life and at all levels in organisations. As a leader in any situation you need to understand these basic principles of leadership:

1. Successful leaders have the ability to vary their style according to the context
2. A more participative style seems to be most effective in most situations
3. Real effectiveness depends on each leader creating and developing their own unique style.

Similar resources you may like

1. What is leadership?
2. Leaders and vision
3. Leading project teams
4. Modern leadership
5. The effect of leaders on a team.

Tags

Action Centred Leadership, Effective Team Leadership, Future of Leadership, High Performance Teams, John Adair, Kouzes & Posner, leadership skills, leadership training

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This entry was posted by Colin Welch on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 9:05 am and is filed under Leadership Skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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