PREPARING TO LEAD

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Leading and Participating In Successful Teams
By Bob Mason

There are very few times in your leadership role in which you will not be involved in a team of some sort. In fact, the best way to approach your leadership responsibility is to think of yourself as leading a team. As a leader you may be responsible for the team, but it will be the team that makes you successful.

Teams are made up of individuals, each having his or her own motivations, likes, dislikes, ideas, and personal issues. That's what makes teams so effective. Synergy, meaning the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, accurately describes effective teamwork.

So, how do you lead teams? First, you must recognize that everyone on the team is an individual who may or may not have the same motivation as you. So it's important to make sure everyone is moving toward the same goal. Every team, whether short-term or long-term, must have a common focus; a mission. As the leader, it's your responsibility to set that mission and make sure everyone understands it.

The Core Components For Successful Team Working
By Duncan Brodie

Being part of a successful team is not just a lot of fun but hugely motivating too. While it might seem like successful team working just happens by chance, the reality is quite different. So what are the core components for successful team working?

Core Component 1: A Clear Purpose

If any team is going to thrive, it needs to be crystal clear about what it is trying to achieve. Sounds simple but so often teams are established which have a completely vague purpose. Make clear what is going to be different once the purpose is achieved.

Core Component 2: Supportive and Appreciative

If you are going to get teams of people working together, you need to be supportive of their efforts and appreciate what they are trying to achieve. Leaders and managers so often overlook this or maybe just get so engrossed in their own problems that they forget about the team.

Read this article...

THIS MONTH'S BOOK REVIEW: Lead Your Boss: The Subtle Art of Leading Up by John Baldoni

There are very few leaders who don't have a boss and, as any leader knows, sometimes it's necessary to lead the boss as well as subordinates. But how? As the book's title suggests, such leadership is a subtle art.

John Baldoni presents a laundry list of techniques for the leader who wants to lead up. After all, helping the boss succeed is really a basic part of leadership responsibility. You want your subordinates to help you succeed and you should strive to help your boss succeed. In Lead Your Boss: The Subtle Art of Managing Up, he breaks the subject into three areas, each building on the next.

Management vs. Leadership. Too much debated, too much misunderstood. I think it's simpler than the way most experts like to define it. All leaders are, by necessity, managers. At the risk of sounding crass, people are resources and resources must be managed. The people who manage those human resources are leaders. They may be bad leaders or good leaders; but they are leaders. The difference comes with managers who understand that, but also embrace those resources as, well, people. They are the ones who have the potential to be good and even great leaders.

One of the problems with this whole management vs. leadership argument is that most seem to see leadership as always good. It isn't. Bad leadership is still leadership. (Read Bad Leadership by Barbara Kellerman). Therefore, when dealing with the human resource, all leaders are managers and all managers are leaders. But, not all leaders are good leaders. And yes, bad leaders are most likely bad managers as well; at least for the human resource.

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Janice was bored. She had been in this meeting for over an hour now and nothing seemed to be getting done. She was part of a team whose purpose was supposed to be to more effectively use personnel, but she suspected the true reason was to provide data that would justify manpower cuts. The team's goals had never been well defined. She wasn't sure why she was on the team anyway because there were only two people the team leader listened to. Everyone else had pretty much given up even trying to contribute and just sat there in the team meetings because they had to. She remembered that at first, there was more interaction but some disagreement had arisen about some minor point. The team leader wanted no conflict and so stopped the discussion. Everyone pretty well understood from that point on that conflict would not be welcome.

What were some of the problems with leadership of Janice's team?

What steps would you take to make this team more effective?

This case study is taken from Preparing to Lead

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