Blog VIII: Team Leadership
Team leadership capacity is a model where different members can take on leadership capacities and share influence depending on the situation which allows for faster responses for more complex issues and allows for the most competent member leading the group for the task he/she is best suited to deal with (Northouse, 2016, p. 365). Two critical functions of team effectiveness are performance/task accomplishment and development/team maintenance. The characteristics which may help or predict team effectiveness in groups include:
- A clear, elevating goal
- Results-driven structure which are features that certain teams need in order to be successful. For example, in another leadership class I’m taking that’s face-to-face, we’re constantly placed in teams to analyze and critique our peers research questions. In our case we’d need a basic understanding of research methods, examples of what research questions look like, time set aside for teams to freely discuss each research question, and computers to gain a background understanding of the research topic as structure to formulate results.
- Competent team members
- A collaborative climate. Using the example earlier, to enable each member to freely discuss and improve components of the research question, everyone in the team must be open to suggestions and supportive of one another when making these suggestions to stimulate the learning environment.
- Unified commitment. For another leadership class I’m taking, one of the ‘virtual’ team projects we have to do in that class takes several weeks. In the first week of the course, my teammates and I created a team charter which included what our team mission was, our shared values, our defined roles in the project and ways in which we would keep each other accountable for our work.
- Standards of excellence. During the team project, every week we’d set deadlines for everyone to complete their work by. We’d set these deadlines a day or two in advance before the actual class deadlines to ensure we had time editing or making changes. After each deadline was set, we would also schedule a video conference to discuss new timelines, work to split up, and strategies.
- External support and recognition
- Principled leadership.
Principled leadership is the central driver of team effectiveness and influences the team through four separate processes: cognitive, motivational, affective, and coordination. In the example I gave earlier about the weeks long team project, I helped coordinate many of our meetings by setting scheduling our team meetings, provided the platform in which we would hold our team meetings, and organized our meeting agendas so that each meeting was streamlined and productive.
Reference:
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.