Business copy: Leading teams

Excerpt from a team coaching workbook for managers:


1. Teams can benefit from having more than one leader figure. Leadership can rotate by the clock, calendar or task. Rotating team leadership helps create more leaders and makes effective use of situational expertise.

2. Strong leaders don’t ensure team success. If team members are ineffective, poorly trained, uninterested or incompetent, the team will stall or fail.

3. A good reality check on whether you’ve created a truly functioning team is to ask, “Do people enjoy being on this team?” People taking on more responsibility, showing initiative, looking beyond immediate, required tasks, and considering the consequences of the actions they take together are signs that being part of the team is a positive and important experience.

4. People who feel good about their teams and team members find new opportunities and challenges to work on together. Such people are convinced of the advantages – the synergy- of working as a team. They look for additional common goals and projects because they already share common objectives, values and mutually supportive relationships.

5. Team coaches and leaders must progressively hand greater responsibility to the team members themselves. Discourage dependence on a single leader figure. True teamwork needs all members to participate fully and rise to challenges. Having one person cling to most of the responsibility is counterproductive. Team members must understand that their responsibilities and opportunities will expand as they grow and develop, and that growth is encouraged and expected.