3 Key Factors to Become a Successful Team Leader

A leadership role is a demanding position. It can be hard to adjust to becoming a leader if you don’t know which areas you’re supposed to focus on. You’re expected to wear different hats and fulfill a host of obligations. It can be overwhelming when you’re assigned to handle a lot of tasks all at once.

The most important one, however, is still the one where you’re expected to develop the team that you lead. You are assumed to direct and motivate your team to contribute to the growth of your organization. At the same time, you also have to invest in the professional growth of your team members.

How do you strike a balance between answering to your manger and handling your team members? There are different factors that will come into play in order for you to become an accomplished leader. These will help you prove your competence and confidence to drive the team to achieve your collective goals.

In order to become an effective team leader, you need to master three elements of your role that are essential to managing your team in the best possible way. Find out what these are and how you can apply them to your role in your organization.

Leading the team 

What does leading a team mean? Simply put, it means enabling your team to work towards collective success. To do this, you need to provide direction and support. Leading a team also means that you need to handle your team in a way that encourages everyone to work more effectively.

Leading a team means thinking in the long term. Given the direction you are expected to provide, you also need to consider how to rally your team to move towards it.  A leader must have a clear and challenging vision for his team. This vision should not only involve the organization and its clients but the team members themselves so that everyone is engaged.

How can you make this happen?  To start, it is important to design your team in a way that will enable everyone to contribute accordingly. This includes choosing a task that everyone must work on together, one that will demand everyone’s skills.  Another one is deciding on the team size, where a small group can do a lot without sacrificing the team’s quality of work.

Another important part of leading the team is securing organizational support for your team members.  Achieving goals is not possible without having the proper backing.  As their leader, you need to ensure that your team members have access to technology and training and that their entitlement to rewards and other benefits is consistently met by the organization.  Providing the necessary things that will ensure that your team performs well should become your priority.

Lastly, you need to know when you should intervene as their leader. There are proper timings to do this to ensure that you are doing it in the most constructive way. To ensure that your team is responsive to leader interventions, do it before they begin a task, halfway through it, when there’s a natural break at work, or after a product has been launched. This allows them to engage with you better and see what you are really helping them with.

Managing the team

As a leader, what does your role entail when it requires managing your team? This element of being a team leader means you have to make sure that your members know their role in the team, and that everyone knows the objectives that your team is working for.

Your team structure is essential to this factor.  You have to review it from time to time and your team members should also be refreshed on what their roles are. This means that you also need to provide feedback on occasion to help everyone know their place and understand what is expected of them.

As their leader, you should always make your team objectives clear.  It must fit your organization’s objectives and coincide with your team’s direction at the same time. You should also check whether your team members know their roles in the group. To make things more straightforward for everyone, it’s best to assign a unique role to every team member to ensure that they will be able to contribute.

One of the most important aspects of managing a team is providing feedback.  You need to provide a formal evaluation of your team members’ individual contributions so that they have a better idea of their performance. This is typically done annually in the form of an annual appraisal or review.  However, providing frequent feedback is more valuable.

You also have to provide feedback on team performance. Being in a team-based organization means that you need to measure your team’s performance based on criteria like team outcomes, ability to work together, and your members’ growth and satisfaction. Besides offering observations, you can also back up your feedback with objective, qualitative, and quantitative data if you can.

Coaching the team

How much time do you spend listening to what your team members have to say? As a leader, you also have to learn how to be a coach. This means forming a rapport with your team members in order to provide support, guidance, and advice in a less formal way.

Being a team leader doesn’t mean you have to become an authority figure every day.  Sometimes, your members want to speak with you regarding things that affect their performance without having to be too serious. There are different things that affect their motivation and engagement at work, and they are worth paying attention to.

One way to coach your team is by listening.  This is not always as simple as it sounds. As a leader, you need to learn how to be an active listener, or knowing how to interpret what they are saying and also reading between the lines. You also have to be an open listener and suspend judgment as your team member starts opening up to you. Learn how you can draw more out of what they want to talk to you about. Lastly, you need to be a reflective listener and effectively re-state and summarize what your member has just told you.

In order to be a good leader and coach, it is crucial to learn how to recognize and reveal your team members’ feelings. You also have to see sides of them that you’re not used to dealing with. Sometimes, you as their leader will be the object of their frustration or anger. They will also feel the same about their other team members on occasion. You have to learn how to help them explore those feelings because it will help with their well-being, improve their ability to deal with them, and maintain the team’s positive emotional climate.

As a coach, it is also important that you give feedback. How is this different from giving feedback as a manager?  This time, you need to focus on your team member’s behavior and its consequences. More than patting them on the back and being patronizing, it’s more of helping them recognize their behavior and how it affects the team.  Remember that positive feedback is always more effective in affecting change in your team member’s behavior, so you should aim for that balance when providing feedback as a coach, as opposed to providing feedback as a manager.

Finally, as the coach, you should always ensure that you and your team agree on your goals. Frequently realigning with them about the team’s direction and objectives, as well as their individual goals, will make your team stronger and inspire better performance from the members. Ensure that the workload is always fair and that everyone is able to cope with their tasks well is also your responsibility. Always look out for your team members to keep them engaged.

Coach Silvia - [email protected]

Silvia Bottini is an international executive and team coach. She is the founder of bCoached, a coaching practice entirely dedicated to those executives and teams who want to increase their global influence and achieve greater results together.