Who do you know who you consider to be a great Team Leader? You? Your manager, your CEO, a famous person?
A good Team Leader knows how to empower a team to achieve group and individual goals. They should be flexible and adaptive and know when to manage and when to lead.
Honesty and integrity are important characteristics of a good leader and in a lot of leaders that we may know, these can be the characteristics that are greatly lacking. How many managers / leaders do you know who have failed to keep their promises or have blamed others to cover up for their own mistakes, or even taken the praise for something one of the team members did! Leaders such as these, will very quickly lose their employees.
A successful Team Leader can achieve great outcomes by having empathy and compassion. Compassion can be defined as the motivation to help others with their physical, emotional or mental problems while empathy is the ability to recognise the emotions of others. Do you spot how someone in your team is feeling?
Another important skill in leadership is coaching, this will give you the ability to hold you and your team accountable. Using coaching methods such as GROW works well to give a team or an individual ownership of goals, look at the way forward and to see how committed the person you are coaching is.
Are you a confident decision maker? Are you self-confident, do you speak and listen well, if these are not traits you were born with, everybody can learn. By listening, you can grow self-esteem in your team which in turn builds greater resilience in your team members.
Good leaders will know how to nurture excellence and will see the best in people and see what they are capable of achieving.
You can never stop learning how to be a better leader.
Our Managing and Leading Teams Open Programme will help you to work on these skills to become a great leader. We have programmes scheduled in the New Year – please get in touch 01623 409 824 or info@futureproof-training.co.uk.
