A leader is not necessarily an executive or manager with dozens or even hundreds of subordinates. Ideally, every member of a successful team can and should have leadership skills. Initiative, responsibility, self-discipline, purposefulness, and self-confidence are the main personal qualities that every employee will need in their work.
Leadership Team Concept
“Leadership team” refers to a model of a group of professionals who consciously take responsibility for a significant portion of decision-making within an organization or a company. An effective leadership team can include not only department heads and managers but also other team members.
Simply put, you don’t have to be a manager in your organization to be a business leader. The benefits of leadership teams are:
- Goal achievement is accomplished through the efforts of all employees, responsibility is shared among all members, not just the manager;
- Building a strong team with quality feedback;
- A developed mentoring culture in the team;
- Quality communication within the staff. Most employees have the skill of public speaking;
- The opportunity for a manager or supervisor to fully delegate authority to employees means that all members are responsible for achieving a common goal.
In such a team, all employees have a high level of self-organization and self-discipline. Another important skill inherent in leadership teams is self-accountability. An employee with such a skill demonstrates enhanced productivity, which also positively affects the performance of the entire team.
Leader as a Role
Leadership is a defined role in an organization without the quality performance of which the success of such an organization is not possible. A professional leader is able to take responsibility for all processes that take place in the team and is not afraid of making tough decisions.
The list of key roles of a business leader includes:
- Coach or mentor. A leader should train employees, help them develop their leadership skills and other competencies needed to successfully achieve company goals;
- Communicator. A leader must be able to establish oral and written communication with team members, employees of other departments, customers, and business partners;
- Delegator. A leader must be able to properly assign and distribute tasks among employees. For this, one must know the strengths and weaknesses of each team member to provide the opportunity to improve their existing skills or learn new ones;
- Strategist. It’s the leader’s responsibility to form a well-thought-out strategy that can make a project or business operations of the company successful. Top leaders will also share their vision of various aspects with team members and encourage them to seek advice;
- Motivator. In order to motivate employees to be productive, a leader must personally demonstrate those values and behaviors that are expected from employees. As a leader, you want to make people around you want to be like you and achieve success in the same way;
- Innovator. A leader must constantly look for new methods and strategies to increase team effectiveness and make it as productive as possible.
All these qualities increase performance not only for individual employees but also for the entire team. This means that an extremely important quality of a successful leader is not only the ability to self-improve but also to motivate team members to become successful themselves.
If your team members notice that you have the same requirements for yourself as you have for them, this builds trust and confidence within the team.
Anyone Can Be a Leader
Leadership qualities are often a talent that helps some employees take responsibility for the results of their or other employees’ work and model a team behavior strategy. However, leadership is also a competency that implies certain skills and knowledge.
Key Leadership Skills
Successful leadership is impossible without the following basic skills:
- The ability to listen and hear. In a successful team, each member brings unique experiences, knowledge, and competencies;
- Self-discipline. A leader must be disciplined and punctual, i.e., stick to deadlines and show up for business meetings on time. That’s how other employees will know they are expected to act in the same way;
- Flexibility and adaptiveness. A leader must be as accurately aware as possible of what is happening within the team and timely prevent unproductive conflicts;
- Responsiveness. It’s equally important to provide feedback to your subordinates and be receptive to their comments.
It’s essential that the organization invests in the leadership development of employees. These are various incentives, including leadership development programs, training courses, team-building sessions, and so on. A great leader doesn’t just “bark” orders but continually builds the necessary skills and motivates other team members to learn.
Conclusions
The development of leadership skills and competencies is not only necessary for existing or future leaders. If all team members are able to demonstrate a high level of self-organization, motivation, and self-discipline, it will have a positive impact on work productivity and accuracy in achieving company goals.
Leadership is both a talent and a set of competencies that can be developed and improved. You don’t have to be the head of a department or a top manager to be a successful leader.
At the same time, leadership is a combination of different roles performed by this or that employee in a company. A successful leader is not only an effective manager but also an effective mentor and motivator to all employees, who knows exactly how to properly delegate responsibilities and motivate employees to work productively.
