Be a Team Leader - 7 Tips For Teams

December 24, 2008 |

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Simon Oates of Succeed at Life

Working and academic life is filled with teams of all sizes and skills. Being able to work among people is considered a crucial aspect of entrepreneurship, and one of the desirable qualities of anyone involved in personal development. Here are my 7 top tips that will transform you from a team hater into a team leader.

Tip 1: Split the work evenly, clearly and minimize overlap.The major advantage of a team is the extra workload it can cope with, but this bonus is wasted when the team is sat together around a laptop producing one piece of output. When I walk around my Universities’ Business School, I often see 5 or more MBA students sitting round one computer. One student will be typing; another talking and 3 people sat there contributing absolutely nothing.

Only by letting team members work on their own chunk of work will you truly be able to harness the productivity bonus of working in a team. Having sole responsibility over their section will also give a boost to their motivation (& ego) and encourage creative thinking. Slight imbalances in levels of contribution will be forgiven but vast differences can cause tensions so speak up as a team member if you feel you have been given too much work or someone else has. This may be difficult in a work situation so call attention to the difference in workload indirectly. One way of doing this is to ask another team member ‘Oh, so what are you doing again?’ in an innocent and genuinely curious tone. After you’ve listened to their reply, get some paper and rather verbally make a list to yourself of what you’ve got to do, clearly itemising each piece of your task. If there is a big enough imbalance then someone should notice, but the fact you hadn’t ‘complained’ means you’re still seen as a focused team player.

Tip 2: Have a constant meeting schedule. A regular nightmare of teaming is arranging constant meetings; a logistical impossibility that usually the Chair or team leader has to cope with. However one method distributes this issue among the team, and this is tip 2.
This technique is ideal if you’re at university where students have roughly the same timetables each week. It can be used to completely eradicate the issue of arranging to meet up; and yet I constantly see students fail to take advantage of this. As a result they spend a lot of their time texting and emailing teammates to arrange their next meeting time. Shame. You may need to arrange extra meetings when tight deadlines are involved but the consistent meetings could be seen as the backbone. As well as ensuring there’s regular communication between the group members; regular meetings totally shift the responsibility from the chairperson to the individual team members. which makes your job (as leader) easier.

Tip 3: Make everyone feel important. An extremely important tip to help drive and motivate others to succeed is found here: The Key To Getting What You Want: Making Others Feel Important

Tip 4: Never blatantly oppose someone’s ideas, (Indirectly call attention to it by ‘stumbling’ upon a bad consequence). The result of mixing lots of ideas together in a team is that from time to time you’ll disagree with a member’s contribution. Your instant reaction could be to challenge them; “Are you sure that’s right?” which may sound nicer than ‘You’re wrong’ but has the same negative consequences.
Even if you refrain from verbally responding its likely your face will screw up or you’ll give some other indication that you disagree, so simply go along with whatever they say; be enthusiastic about it. You need to see how to change their opinion from their point of view, so for the time being; adopt their point of view. If their suggestion was bad enough then it would result in a negative consequence. What you must do is talk through the idea enthusiastically until you ‘hit’ upon this negative consequence, seem disappointed at this bad point that seemed to come out of nowhere, and then instead of denouncing your opponents idea, you can then talk as if YOUR opinion was wrong, and then it’d be far easier for them to just admit their mistake and continue, so have let them save face. They are more likely to concede to someone on their side who they think wants to support their idea, rather than someone who is opposed to them. In apposing someone’s ideas, there’s also the chance they may get aggressive. Side step around pride; use tip #4.

Tip 5: Learn names. You may laugh at this point; “Well of course I know everyone’s name in the teams I work with”. Consider yourself the exception. The rest of us have all been in a situation where we’ve felt there are too many people to learn, or where one member has a heavy accent and a foreign name. From now on, I never want you to have to use that last excuse.
We’ve all pretended to hear someone’s name after asking twice and giving up because of the embarrassment. It’s a bit shameful of us, but importantly, it cripples that person’s role in the team.
If you’re an important member of the team; you’ve just effectively cut off one of your great resources. You’ll now casually avoid starting conversation with this person, and indirectly push them out of the group as they become less involved with decision-making. As soon as you learn someone’s name; they’ll be suddenly ‘opened up’ as a source of help and you will sometimes feel as though you’ve gained an extra team member!
So from now on when you’re in that situation, don’t stop at the second attempt. Say: “I’m sorry I haven’t heard that name before, can you spell it?”. Afterwards, look at what you’ve written again and make sure you remember it.

Tip 6: Praise as heavily as a teacher would. A key concept in management that is recognised nationwide is that a dog will behave well for treats, but would simply resent the whip. Do you give treats or use the whip? Or both?
When I talk about ‘the whip’, I mean embarrassing, criticising (even if it’s quite ‘constructive’), humiliating, condemning and undermining someone. It reads like a terrible list of words yet you’ll find you do a couple of them in some minor shape or form. This is acceptable, but you do you want to be just acceptable? Wouldn’t you prefer to be brilliant and inspire brilliant work from your teammates and earn some respect from them?
Its so easy to criticise and you may not realise how often to do it. But you can count on one thing, the target of the criticism will remember. Fortunately the same applies to compliments. One small compliment has the opportunity for a real turn-around in someone behaviour, yet you may not even realise you’ve given it. Learn to pay effective compliments, compliment everything someone does well, even if just subtly. You’ll be rewarded with optimistic teammates with a ‘can do’ attitude. And remember; “If you think you can, you can”.

Tip 7: Lead the team
This is such an big principle that it has been given it’s own post: Learn To Lead: How to make others do what you say