Leading Teams In A Week

Team Leadership In Seven Simple Steps

Nigel Cumberland

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781473622968
• eBook ISBN: 9781473622975
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leading a team just got easier
We live in a world of teams made up of all kinds of people. We see this every day on TV, in newspapers and on the web - it might news about a winning sports team, a company's leadership team who have succeeded in buying another company or it might be a about a group of homeowners who have won a battle against a big developer. This book is aimed at helping all of us no matter what kinds of teams we might need to lead - it might be a group of people running a country, playing a sport for university, organizing a Church fete, leading a start-up company, or managing a global multinational group. All such teams have leaders, who are those individuals given the task of ensuring that their team works well together to achieve whatever goals and objectives are required. Very few if any of us will spend our entire lives without at some point leading other people even if only for a short time and in many cases we often lead others without having a formal leadership title.In seven chapters, this book will walk you through the entire process of successfully leading and managing a team, showing you the key dos and don'ts and spelling out where you need to put special attention and focus. These seven chapters cover:
- How to get started with a team, exploring what a great team looks like and how it performs, and how to create a new team from scratch with individuals who bring their own habits, skills and expectations
- The stages of development of a team and how a new manager can gain the respect and understanding of a team
- The importance of aligning a team and setting common goals and expectations with clear agreement on a mission, vision and values.
- How to create a team culture and processes of excellent communication, with clearly understood expectations, well run team meetings and discussions, and the minimizing of any conflict and gossip
- How to work with remote or virtual team members where face-to-face meetings are difficult to arrange
- How to identify and work with problematic and nonperforming members of your team and how to balance
fairness and discipline
- How to ensure that each team member's job role is clear and that the work is efficiently delegated and shared among the team members
- How to grow your team through excellent training and development, including coaching, mentoring and on-thejob training
- How to turn a good team into a team with a culture of excellence
- How to create a self-functioning team which can operate in your absence and in which you have groomed a successor to take over from you if needed.

The Sunday and Monday chapters have discussed how to take over a new team, the different stages of team development and how to set your team’s direction and goals. This has created a framework that allows you to get the team as a whole into an optimal shape or alignment. We will now explore how to ensure that each individual member of your team is able to perform his or her role optimally.

This chapter will show you how to:

• Place the right people in roles that suit their interests, personality, skills and experience

• Use a model to understand the typical kinds of work-role preferences that different people might have

• Delegate and allocate work to your team to ensure that the work is completed and that the work is shared fairly

• Ensure that individuals’ goals and key performance indicators are in alignment with the team’s and organization’s goals

• Engage with, empower and motivate your team so that they will succeed in ways above and beyond what is expected of them.

Managing the individuals in your team

‘An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.’

Stephen Covey

A participant in a management training course that I was leading recently said that he would rather be in charge of 100 machines than be in charge of just one person. That may sound extreme but many managers, even those with many years of experience in leading others, can feel overwhelmed by the prospect of having to manage and deal with the individuals in their team.

A key role of anyone leading a team is to ensure that each member of the team:

• is placed in the optimal job role

• understands what to do

• knows why it needs doing

• understands how to do it

• is able to do it

• actually wants to do it.

I have developed the following six-step framework to help you ensure that each person in a team is given every possible chance of being a successful performer and contributor who will hopefully stay with the team.

The six-step team talent management framework

In many ways being a great manager is learning to ask the right questions, rather than knowing the answers. The ‘six steps’ are in the form of six questions which you are strongly encouraged to ask yourself whenever you face challenges in managing members of your team.

The remainder of this chapter will walk you through this important model.

Step 1. WHO do you place in each role within your team?

Before determining what work, task and goals each team member needs to complete, you must first ensure that you have the ideal people in each job role.

I once hired an accountant to work in my team and for a couple of years she did a great job. She was a highly qualified accountant with a stellar track record. Then one day she made a serious mistake in a spreadsheet that she had created. When she came to apologize we began talking about how tedious and sometimes boring being an accountant can be. She then revealed that she did not enjoy her job any more and that was probably why she was making mistakes. She spoke of preferring job roles that would be more people-focused and customer-facing. Luckily I was able to offer her a customer service role which ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• About the Author
• Title
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Sunday Getting started with your team
• Monday Alignment and goal-setting for your team
• Tuesday Delegating and managing the work within your team
• Wednesday Optimal communication within your team
• Thursday Motivating poor performers in your team
• Friday Inspiring high performers in your team
• Saturday Creating and maintaining a culture of excellence
• 7 × 7
• Answers
• Copyright