Posts Tagged ‘team leadership’

As a leader you recognise that more can be achieved collectively than you could individually.  Yet in my experience, leaders often make mistakes that stifle rather than encourage performance.  Are you making one or more of these mistakes?

Mistake 1: Holding on to things out of habit rather than neccessity.

Mistake 2: Playing at pretend empowerment where you keep interfering and checking up.

Mistake 3: Having to be right and so not listening effectively to others contributions.

Mistake 4: Needing to be liked rather than respected and letting popularity cloud your decision making.

What else would you add to the list?  Go ahead and leave your comment.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps orgnisations to get great results through teams.  To find out more click here

In week 4 of The Apprentice, the teams were tasked with developing, producing and selling two natural beauty products.

The teams were mixed up again, with Noorul leading what turned out to be the winning team and Paula leading the losing team.  The big learning point from this week was that it is often the most basic of mistakes that can be the most costly.

So let’s compare both of the teams.  As a team leader, Noorul was clearly not leading and any time where a decision needed to be made he looked like a rabbit in the headlights.  There was absolutely nothing in the way of creativity and the product, particularly the soap was awful.  When it came to selling he just could not do it, despite the fact that in one of the clips he would rate himself 10 out 10 when it came to selling.  Yet despite all of this he and his team delivered a profit of just under £500.

Paula by contrast was a great team leader.  She took decisions, made things happen, a good example being the sale of the remaining stock as a single batch.  She was creative and pretty dynamic on the whole.  So what was the big mistake that was made?  Choosing a hugely expensive fragrance and not considering the financial consequences.

So what in summary are the leadership lessons can we learn form this week’s show?

1. A great product, with good marketing and selling is not enough
2. Crunching the numbers might be dull but essential to running any successful organisation
3. Delegation need to be clear and unambiguous
4. It is important to be self aware
5. When in a situation of conflict, choose your tactics wisely
6. Not being an expert in something is not a defence.  If you are the leader, the buck stops with you.

You can watch The Apprentice in the UK every Wednesday evening at 9pm or on the BBCiplayer

A team as a collective can deliver much greater results than any one individual could.  A key component in any team is the leadership of the team.  So what are my 4 key tips when it comes to leading teams?

Tip 1:  Have a clear vision

If you don’t know where you are heading, how will you know when you have got to the destination?  Put differently, it is essential that you create a clear vision of what you want the team to achieve so that it can be understood by everyone.

Tip 2: Learn to be a great listener

You are the leader and have many ideas, views, opinions and solutions.  Your team know that this but also want to be able to offer their views and feel like they have been heard. A good leader recognises this and focuses most of their communication on listening.

Tip 3:  Be someone who takes decisions

As a leader you need to weigh up the upside and downside of any particular option and then decide.  Team members may not always support your decisions 100% or may not have taken the exactly the same decision.  On they other hand they will respect you for not procrastinating.

Tip 4:  Empower your team 

One of the big advantages of a team is the range and variety of skills and experience that is available.  You know what you are good at and not so good at, so empower those to do what they do best.

Leaders’ priority is to deliver results.  When leaders deliver results they create success for the organisation’s they lead which leads to more personal success.  While leaders deliver results those leaders that are truly successful recognise that creating and building teams are critical to their success.   So why are teams so critical to your success as a leader?

Only one of you

As a leader you are probably extremely good at what you do and highly capable.  After all you would not have achieved the success you have so far unless you were good.  That said, there is only one of you and you have finite amount of time.  24 hours a day, 168 hours in a week, and 744 hours in a month is what you have no matter how great a leader you are.  With this limit in time, there is a limit on what you can get done on your own.

Skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

Teams bring a much greater of range skills, knowledge, experience and expertise than any one leader could ever have.  Think about it.  Every Managing Director or CEO started out their business career in a particular discipline.  It might have been marketing, sales, finance, operations or human resources to name just a few.  They started out experts and became generalists and more rounded.  At the same time they recognise that they can never be experts in every area of business so they build teams with complimentary skills, knowledge, experience and expertise.

Creativity

You might be a highly creative person. Imagine having 5 or 10 other creative people contributing ideas, knowledge and enthusiasm into creating a compelling vision for the organisation.  How much richer would the final product or output be in this situation?  Leaders who achieve success know that much more can be created through teams working together than working on their own.

So teams maximise the possibilities and achievements but what can leaders do to leverage the benefits of teams and achieve success:

1. Know what you are brilliant at

2. Be aware of the gaps in your skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

3. Make sure that your teams are full of people with complimentary skills, knowledge, experience and expertise

4. Make recruitment a priority area in your business so that you attract and recruit the best people

Bottom line – The best leaders know that teams are critical to their success.  So what steps are you going to take to be an even more successful leader?

A team as a collective can deliver much greater results than any one individual could.  A key component in any team is the leadership of the team.  So what are my 7 key tips when it comes to leading teams?

Tip 1:  Have a clear vision

If you don’t know where you are heading, how will you know when you have got to the destination?  Put differently, it is essential that you create a clear vision of what you want the team to achieve so that it can be understood by everyone.

Tip 2: Learn to be a great listener

You are the leader and have many ideas, views, opinions and solutions.  Your team know that this but also want to be able to offer their views and feel like they have been heard. A good leader recognises this and focuses most of their communication on listening.

Tip 3:  Be someone who takes decisions

As a leader you need to weigh up the upside and downside of any particular option and then decide.  Team members may not always support your decisions 100% or may not have taken the exactly the same decision.  On they other hand they will respect you for not procrastinating.

Tip 4:  Empower your team 

One of the big advantages of a team is the range and variety of skills and experience that is available.  You know what you are good at and not so good at, so empower those to do what they do best.

Tip 5:  Encourage participation

In any team there will be those who are vocal and those who will be quieter.  Your role as a leader is to encourage the full range of contributions and encourage the introverts who make great contributions to get their point across.

Tip 6: Be a role model

One of the best ways to show how you want others to act, behave and interact is to show them.  By being a role model you encourage others to follow your lead.

Tip 7:  Know your team limits

Within any team there will be a range of skills and abilities.  If you are to lead effectively you need to understand the limits of all team members.

Bottom Line – Leading a team is a challenge but by doing some simple things you can become a highly effective team leader.  So what’s your first step in becoming a highly effective team leader?

One of the great benefits of a team is the range of skills, knowledge, experience and personal attributes that they can draw on to address a problem or issue.  On the other hand, the full potential of this diverse range of expertise is often not fully exploited.  This might be due to one or more of the following factors:

• People don’t fully appreciate what others are good at

• People make assumptions about what people can or cannot do rather than finding out

• People think and maybe even believe that they are masters at everything

• People don’t like acknowledging that they are not great at some things for fear of losing face or worrying how it will change others perceptions of them

As the leader of the team your job is to make sure that you get each and every one of your team members performing at their optimal level, so take the time and make the effort to discover and exploit the strengths of your team members.