What can I do Monday morning to start becoming a great team leader?
Michael Jordan was a great basketball player, but more importantly, he made the Chicago Bulls a great basketball team. Jordan raised his teammates’ level of play. John D. Rockefeller said, “Good leadership consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.” Great leaders improve the performance of their team members.
Improving team performance is usually a matter of training your team and then releasing it. Take some time to evaluate your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Is your team strong at creativity but poor at follow through? Strong in ethics but poor in customer service?
Once you have evaluated, find a way to correct your team’s weaknesses. Could you provide training in a certain area? Should you hire a specialist in a certain area to help performance? If you need to, offer constructive criticism or motivation—remind employees of the reasoning behind a certain plan of action, and keep their eyes on the ultimate goal.
As for your team’s strengths, determine ways to release your team to use its strengths. If your team has great customer service skills, praise them for that and work on ways to increase their interaction with customers. Give them opportunities to succeed and the freedom to do what they do best. Don’t try to do everything yourself, but be able to delegate to the people around you—show them that you trust them.
A huge part of leadership is developing vision, and in order to determine where your team needs to go, you will first need to determine where you are.