Team Development is one of my Bitesize Leadership Techniques. They are exactly what the title suggests. Short snippets of leadership tips, tools, process and ideas for you to use on a just-in-time basis. Use them as an update and to refresh your leadership professionalism. You could call it leadership in a hurry! This article is an Executive Summary of my eBook of the same name – Team Development –published on Amazon Kindle. If you are a subscribers to Kindle Unlimited you can borrow and read the eBook for free.
What & Why
Leadership Team Development is about building and maintaining high-performing teams that deliver on their KPIs, solve problems together and create new approaches for the organisation. When you become a Leader of Others a key work value you accept is that your role is to get results through others. This means their success is your success. Because people work in teams, you will need to apply your leadership time to a number of key activities: selecting the right people; defining team purpose and processes; understanding the composition and motivation of the team; providing ongoing support.
Quote on teamwork by Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie: “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”
Leadership Team Development is about using appropriate methods and interpersonal styles to develop, motivate and support a team toward successful outcomes and achievement of team and organisational business objectives.
How
Here are some practical principles you can follow for Team Development:
Building yourself a high performance team. You select the right people through rigorous recruitment processes, and guide the team to become an efficient and cohesive functioning unit. Remember you are selecting people for both current tasks and for their future potential. Importantly, your team becomes more than the sum of its individual members.
Managing your team process. The team or group process is how people are responding to each other, to the team leader and to the way the team is working. As team leader, your job is to manage interactions between these high-performing, highly motivated individuals – all with their own agendas and expectations – and guide them toward a common purpose.
Understanding your team members. It is important for you as leader to get to know and understand your individual team members and the roles that they can fill within the team. This is outside the tasks relating to their job roles and responsibilities. You need to understand how that person can make a productive contribution within the team. How they will interact with other members in a positive way that ensures the whole team is effective.
Providing your team with purpose. You ensure the purpose of each team you lead is clearly defined. This can be achieved by working with team members to develop a Team Charter. The team charter documents the mission and purpose of the team, and provides the team with a roadmap for how they intend to do business. In addition it represents an agreement among team members on how the team will work as an empowered partnership.
Supporting your team. Team Development is not just something you do as a leader and stop. It requires your constant leadership attention. Once you’ve built a team for success, you will provide ongoing support through group and individual coaching, feedback and guidance. You will need to stay close to team performance, keep the team on track and facilitate adjustments to the journey when necessary.
Further Reading
The LARA Leadership Learning series consists of 10 short modules published as Kindle eBooks and Paperbacks on Amazon. They are organised against the Leader of Others leadership competencies. If you are a subscribers to Kindle Unlimited you can read these eBook for free.
On this Blog look for the ‘Team Charter Template’ and the ‘Team Development Overview’ in the Coaches Toolkit
Tuckman Team Forming Model
