Team Leader
Lynn Harris
10-minute read
Good news for Team Leaders
What matters most to the people you lead is within your control
Most work in your organization is done in teams.
The success of these teams largely determines the success of your organization.
If you lead a team, you therefore have one of the most important jobs in your company. Teams really are the engines of organizations and team leaders are the engineers whose job it is to build and maintain the engines for team and organizational performance.
Many organizations understand this, which is why they invest time, energy, and money to develop their leaders. However, given the importance of appointing and developing good team leaders to create engaged and high-performing teams, it’s surprising how little organizations generally know about their many teams.
“Companies almost universally miss the importance of teams, as evidenced by the fact that most companies don’t even know how many teams they have at any moment in time, and who is on them, let alone which are the best ones…”
- Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall Nine Lies About Work
Knowing which are your highest performing teams is important, not least because high-achieving teams enjoy a 23% boost in performance compared with underachieving teams.
In the absence of organizational knowledge about your best performing teams, creating and building teams is generally left to individual team leaders. But as a team leader, how do you navigate the numerous leadership competencies that your company expects of you? And if you read even a fraction of the 60,000+ leadership books available on Amazon, how do you distill the essence of advice around technical skills, people skills, being inspirational, creating and articulating a vision and purpose, thinking strategically, execution, decision-making, challenging conversations, setting clear direction, motivating others, navigating change, creating innovation, leading through disruption and, of course, the ever-elusive, executive presence?
There’s lots of good advice out there – but wouldn’t it be helpful if you could narrow it down to what matters most in creating engagement and a high-performing team?
Wouldn’t it be great if somewhere there was some rigorous research that helped to identify what is crucial about being an outstanding team leader?
In 2018 the ADP Research Institute (ADPRI) surveyed 19,000 employees across nineteen countries. Their Global Study of Engagement provides, amongst other findings, compelling data on what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest. In their book, Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham (one of the ADP researchers) and Ashley Goodall summarize the ADP findings on Team Leadership:
“…what more than two decades of research into teams and their leaders has to tell us is this: what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is …firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly, that you make us feel that you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals…When you come to excel as a leader of a team it will be because you’ve successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs.”
This is good news because, as a team leader, what matters most to the people you lead is within your control.
You can help your people feel connected to a mission and purpose and feel part of something bigger than themselves – or not.
You can ensure your people feel valued and recognized for their unique strengths and contribution – or not.
You can help your people feel challenged to grow and improve – or not.
To be an outstanding team leader you need to create experiences for your people that help them feel connected to your mission and purpose, feel valued and recognized, and help them grow and improve. Here are seven recommendations on how you can do this
Be enthusiastic about the mission of your company and define the purpose of your team in helping to achieve that mission – use your mission and purpose to make key decisions and talk about it whenever you can to inspire confidence in the future
Agree clear expectations with every team member and connect what they do to achieving the company mission and team purpose - reinforce at every opportunity to help people feel part of something bigger than themselves
Agree shared team values and behaviors and support and challenge each other to live by them – create a team where you all have each other’s backs
Identify individual team member strengths and put people in roles where they can play to their strengths for at least part of everyday – if this isn’t possible, you probably have them in the wrong job
Give attention and care to every individual team member and recognize them for excellent work when they do it – aim to genuinely praise and reinforce three times more than you criticize
Support and challenge your people to grow and progress in different directions – encourage career experiments
Connect with your team members often, in both a professional and a human way – if you don’t have time for this you may have too many people in your team
How you as a team leader go about creating followership is down to your own unique set of characteristics and expertise. You need to experiment and find your own idiosyncratic ways of applying these seven recommendations and creating experiences within your team that result in people wanting to follow you.
And so, this final recommendation is about you. Given you have one of the most important jobs in your organization it might help to define your own leadership purpose. Ask yourself why you choose to lead and why others would follow you? This will help you to identify your own leadership values and expertise; and the contribution you want to make to your organization and your team.
Lynn Harris is a founding Partner of Leadership Mindset Partners