When learning how to be a good team leader, what should you focus on? What does it take to draw the best out of your team?
To be a good team leader, you should regularly evaluate your team’s performance and encourage team members to become leaders. By learning to empower your employees, you can support them in becoming leaders and encourage them to perform better.
Read on to learn how you can become a better leader.
Position Your Team for Success
When considering how to be a good team leader, you should think about both how to assemble your team and how to encourage the best of them. After you’ve assembled a team with the potential to reach its collective goal, your next focus should be helping your team perform at its best. You can do this by regularly evaluating your team’s performance and encouraging team members to become leaders.
Evaluate Your Team’s Performance
To achieve its goals, a team must regularly evaluate its performance so that it can make any necessary improvements. Experts recommend identifying clear criteria to measure your progress. For example, a nonprofit organization might evaluate its impact based on people served, funds generated, and amount spent.
Clear criteria allow you to objectively gauge how well your team is doing. This can help you make smarter decisions and adjust your team’s strategies to achieve better results.
(Shortform note: In Deep Work, Cal Newport recommends using lagging and leading metrics to evaluate and improve your team’s performance. Leading metrics measure progress, such as the actions you’re taking that lead to your goal—for example, the hours your team spends training or your marketing budget. Lagging metrics measure the outcome, or how well your team met your desired goal—for example, the matches won or sales made. Once you create these metrics for your team, Newport recommends publicly displaying them to keep the team motivated and also celebrate small successes.)
Empower People to Become Leaders
A team’s leadership is the key factor that determines whether it performs at its fullest potential and succeeds in meeting its goal. Good leaders enable their team instead of holding it back. They know how to inspire and motivate people, push their capabilities, and empower them to take on responsibilities.
(Shortform note: There isn’t a single model of an effective team leader, but James Kouzes and Barry Posner write that good leaders do five things: They lead by example, motivate their team with an inspiring vision, challenge the status quo, empower others to act, and genuinely care about their team. According to research, 96% of team members with these types of leaders feel highly engaged at work, and companies with these types of leaders experience 18 times the net income growth compared to companies with leaders who don’t follow these principles.)
To create a team with strong leadership, devote time and energy to developing your team members into leaders. Leadership isn’t a fixed role that belongs to a single person—instead, the role might be better managed by different people depending on the situation. Instead of having the same person make decisions for all tasks and projects, you should delegate leadership to the person with the most experience and capabilities for the task at hand. This allows you to optimize the performance of your team and leverage the unique strengths of your team members.
(Shortform note: In Turn This Ship Around!, former US Navy captain L. David Marquet echoes this suggestion to delegate leadership and proposes a leader-leader model: Everyone thinks like a leader and decisions are made by those who know the most about the situation. To promote the leader-leader model within your team, have team members state what they intend to do next instead of asking superiors for directions. Marquet says decentralizing decision-making makes the team more resilient and effective in the long run because it doesn’t depend on a single person’s skills and decisions.)
Exercise: Structure Your Team for Success
To build a winning team, you must have the right people in the right roles. Reflect on your team’s needs and how you can better structure your team for success.
- Write down the goals you hope to achieve with your team. What are some potential challenges you expect to face along the way?
- What kind of people would be on your ideal team for overcoming those challenges and achieving goals? For example, you might want team members with diverse perspectives or those who are highly creative.
- How does your current team compare with your ideal team? How can you adjust your team so that it aligns more with your ideal vision? For example, you could consider changing people’s roles or letting go of some members who may be holding the team back.
- Does your team have a catalyst, or a person who energizes and inspires your team? If so, how can you encourage them to be more of a positive influence? If not, how might you start looking for one?
- What are some ways you can train and develop the supporting members of your team?
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Here's what you'll find in our full The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork summary:
- Why building a high-performing team requires hard work
- Why no one can accomplish anything significant by themselves
- How to recruit and organize the right people to achieve your goal
