Team Leadership Skills
Prior to this, we’ve dug into HOW teamwork really can make the dream work in our organizations and we looked at a few core competencies we’ll need to develop for effective team leadership. Now it’s time we really hash out exactly what skills we need to apply on a daily basis if we want to build the kind of team that great people want to actively engage in and the kind of team that yields the profitability our organization depends on.
As we started down this path, I referenced the direct ties between employee engagement and the feeling of being connected with a strong team. Here’s something I just read in an article from the Society for Human Resource Management detailing how employee engagement in the United States has dropped for the first time in 10 years (according to a recent Gallup poll). The same article also cited a year over year increase in the number of employees who admitted to being actively disengaged. If you’ve heard me share about this topic before, you know these are the folks I refer to as the ones who are trying to sink the boat!
The most concerning comment I saw in that article defined the group that had the sharpest rise in active disengagement: managers! It shared, “Gallup found that managers reported the most disengagement in 2021. This is significant because managers are often the key to helping boost employee engagement.”
Consider that statement I shared with you as we started down this path, “19,000 worldwide workers found that employees who reported they felt a ‘strong sense of teamwork’ described themselves as ‘fully engaged’.” Now let’s pit that against the rise in admitted disengagement among managers… That makes a strong case for just how important the team leadership skills we’ll be looking at now (and over the next few days) really are to building high performing teams! In fact, the SHRM article went on to say that “The best managers—those who help employees feel engaged—will lead their teams to top performances. They know the strengths of their team members, recognize their desire to make a difference and help them set priorities to do so. They also give plenty of constructive feedback, having at least one meaningful conversation per week with each employee.”
As I scoured other resources on this topic, they all seemed to echo that statement in the SHRM article and list effective communication as the most critical skill for building great teams. Since I do it so often, I won’t go into the specifics for each of the four primary communication styles, but this plays a huge role in whether or not a supervisor, manager, or anyone else with team leadership responsibility makes any conversation they have with their team members truly meaningful. Recognizing and understanding each team member’s unique communication and behavioral style helps us adapt the feedback we provide to meet their individual needs. Having this kind of insight about them also helps us understand where they’re most interested in making a difference and how their strengths best fit within the team.
When we start with this foundation, creating a sense of belonging within the team and earning a higher level of engagement become much easier - and that leads right into the team leadership skill we’ll look at next…
Sweet Emotion? No, Managing Emotions!
We could argue the impact communication has as a team leadership skill if we really wanted to, but we’d need to be OK with being wrong! Since everyone I know who takes their leadership responsibilities seriously doesn’t have time for such stuff, let’s push forward to what the Harvard Business School’s article called 7 Skills You Need to Effectively Manage Teams shows following right behind communication in the #2 spot on their list: Emotional Intelligence.
In defining that #2 skill, the author of the article shares this:
Emotional intelligence refers to an individual’s ability to manage their emotions, as well as those of others.
A highly developed level of emotional intelligence is a hallmark of strong managers and leaders. Someone with a keen sense of self-awareness, empathy, and other social skills is someone who can motivate and influence others—an important quality for managers to exhibit.
Since I’ve shared quite a bit about emotional intelligence through several articles like this, in a few lessons in our Leading At The Next Level program, as well as in a complimentary webinar we offer periodically called Creating an Emotionally Intelligent Culture that Impacts Your Organization's Bottom Line, I’ll fight the urge to go very far down that path again here. I will share that achieving the “highly developed level of emotional intelligence” the HBS article attributes to being a “hallmark of strong managers and leaders” is much simpler when we have the right tools.
For what it’s worth, applying the exact same tools that help us “give plenty of constructive feedback, having at least one meaningful conversation per week with each employee” that the SHRM article suggested we do to build engagement can also helps us build that highly developed level of emotional intelligence - once we understand how to apply all the DISC Model of Human Behavior really offers… In over two decades of studying behavior and workplace communication, there’s just nothing else that offers a more practical approach to self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management - the four components that make up emotional intelligence.
Hey, I get it… Not everyone wants a practical approach to increasing productivity and decreasing turnover. That’s fine by me. But even for those who are only interested in the increased profit margin that those things yield, managing those sweet emotions (I couldn’t help but reference Aerosmith at least once) is a fairly simple way of doing it…
Now let’s take a look at two more team leadership skills on that HBS list AND I’ll share a readily available tool for honing them. Before that though, I’d like to extend a unique offer with regards to how you learn to recognize communication styles… If you’re not clear on how you can apply the DISC model of Human Behavior to develop your own level of emotional intelligence, schedule a 15 minute call with me so we can chat through the best approach for you!
Nobody’s That Good By Themselves!
Two of the most important team leadership skills we need to create an atmosphere the people can be excited to be part of and actively engage in our organizational objectives are communication and emotional intelligence - but it doesn’t stop there! According to the Harvard Business School article I referenced last time, the ability to delegate and a spirit of openness are nearly as critical if we want to lead in a way that builds a strong team!
Developing the ability to delegate, as well as the discipline to do it routinely, is incredibly important for anyone with leadership responsibility. As our leadership load increases, the demands on our time can seem never-ending. Even when we’re more effective at performing certain tasks than anyone else on our team, we have to take a hard look at which things we really should be doing ourselves and which things we should be assigning to someone else. This is so important that Cindy and I built tools for doing this into two of the six lessons of our Emerging Leader Development course!
But when we look at delegation with regards to the impact it has on building a strong team environment, it’s about more than just effectively using our own time… The HBS article shares that “However tempting it might be for you to micromanage members of your team, doing so can be detrimental to progress.” This is a real issue every leader I know struggles with at one time or another. It can be tough to let go of things we do well and it can be even tougher to keep our hands out of the cake batter when the person we’ve delegated the task to isn’t stirring it quite as thoroughly or as quickly as we think we could!
In addition to the constant fight to avoid micromanaging, we also need to make sure we’re very intentional about how we delegate tasks. This can’t be a function of passing off the things we don’t want to do, we need to consider which team member can handle the task and which team member can grow through the process. Since we cover that in far more detail through Emerging Leader Development than I possibly could here, let’s move on…
Many of the supervisors, managers, and business owners I’ve interacted with over the last twenty years or so have held a lot of things very close to the vest. Only a select few of their closest friends or highest level managers were given access to much information. And in many of those cases, those same folks felt quite a bit of pressure to put up a strong front with the majority of the team who worked for them. That rarely earned respect or buy-in because no one is good enough to hide all their flaws forever…
Having a spirit of openness doesn’t stop at being willing to acknowledge our own weaknesses or concerns, we also need to be willing to listen (you know, part of that communication thing) when a team member brings something to us. The HBS article listed openness as their fifth most important team leadership skill and stated that, “If your employees don't believe they can reach out to you, there’s a risk that problems or concerns will go unaddressed before it's too late to correct them.”
Amen to that. And allowing concerns to go unaddressed, for whatever reason, will quickly lead to so many more issues that eat away at our organization’s performance.
With each of these team leadership skills in mind, we’ll close the loop by looking at three simple questions we need to be constantly asking ourselves so we can perform each of the four skills we’ve just worked through to the best of our ability!
Our Actions Have to Answer These Questions!
When we’re intentional about delegation and openness, especially in a way that truly develops the strengths of each team member we lead, we’re well on our way to providing them with the answers they’re already asking to three very important questions. Without answering these questions effectively, we just won’t be able to earn the kind of buy-in that produces a strong team or yields a high level of employee engagement - and our organization’s overall performance will suffer as a result!
In Everyone Communicates, Few Connect, John Maxwell says that everyone needs to know these things before we can develop a solid connection with them, “Can they help me? Do they care for me? Can I trust them?”
That spoke so loudly to me and Cindy that we dedicated a section of one of the lessons in our Emerging Leader Development course to helping participants identify the mentors they’ve had in their lives who exemplified those things and we challenge them to detail how they can do that same thing for each of the team members they lead. She and I both have several people who have done exactly that for us and we work to pass that forward to the people we serve on a daily basis.
In an article I read recently called The Role and 5 Essential Responsibilities of a Team Leader, said that a team leader has the responsibility to “Care for the health, safety and welfare of your people; You have a duty of care to look after your people.” While that article is referring to a team leader as a specific position within an organization, one that really seemed to be tied to what I saw in a Lean Manufacturing structure, I believe this particular “responsibility” applies to anyone who wants to build a team environment among the individuals they’re charged with leading!
When we delegate in a way that helps our team members grow, we show them we can help them. When we commit to a spirit of openness, admitting to our weaknesses and owning up to our mistakes, we prove that they can trust us. And when our actions show them that we really care for their health, safety, and welfare, they have no doubt that we really care for them!
With these team leadership skills embedded into all that we do, the results will never be hard to see!