Three Chief Requirements for Building Team Leadership

If you truly want to help your organization with your team-oriented leadership, you will have to fulfill three chief requirements: raising awareness, generating options, and planning for success.

Raising Awareness

Your first assignment, if you have the courage to undertake it, is to get the team to take an honest look at itself. You need to serve as a large mirror, one free from distortion. It may seem like magic when a team jells, but there is a structure to that magic. Your job is to help each team make an accurate assessment of its actions and structure. Why do things go well when it is succeeding, and what are its problems when it is struggling? You need to be able to help the team describe what was and is happening so that it can live its life consciously. You are acting as a key catalyst by raising awareness for the whole team. It is a basic premise of this book that a team is better off knowing what is going on than not knowing. The team may be a little too close to its day-to-day activities and routines to notice the patterns. If you have a keen sense of the obvious, you are likely to be helpful to teams in organizational settings. Helping a team understand its strengths and its problems is the first step in its becoming more effective.

Generating Options

If you are looking for a single best way to help teams, you are reading the wrong book. There is no one best way to capitalize on strengths and minimize weaknessesinstead there are many pathways to the same result. The members of your teamlike all of usdevelop habits and set ways of doing things; you need them to consider other options. The wisdom of teams results from the diversity of views available. You need to free up their minds to brainstorm strategies and tactics that can make a difference. You can also help by adding options for the team to consider, but be careful about getting sucked into making decisions for the team. It is best to facilitate consensus decisions.

If you want a committed, not merely compliant, team, you need to get the members to choose from among its options while staying within the boundaries set by your organization. Leaders in a team environment provide guidance in a process that alternates between expanding the thinking of the team and then gaining a focus regarding what is to be done to resolve the issues.

Planning for Success

Too often, teams are so relieved they have come up with a solution that they fail to take the steps needed to ensure the strategy is put into practice. Teams dump this responsibility on management or the system and then get frustrated when action does not follow. The team concept is not designed to create a new complaint department or to facilitate members lower in the organization in pointing the finger of blame at other teams or members of management. If you are going to help your team, you need to push it to make the ideas it produces operational. What tactics and actions are needed for an idea to be realized? Who needs to do what with whom by when?

You cannot second-guess the team after decisions have been made. You need to help the team produce an action plan for whatever solution the team decided on in the previous stage. The action plan must rely on actions taken by team members themselves if it primarily dictates what others in the organization should do to solve the problem, the likelihood of successful implementation is low. Freedom of speech is important, but the key to empowerment is team self- reliance .