What are leadership best practices? How do you get your team to work at its full capacity? Are there any helpful tips and tricks to get your team unstuck? Well, of course everybody claims that leadership is a quality you are borne with and you can’t really learn. That is true in most cases but it’s also very important to learn from other people’s experiences. So if you don’t know how to get things started in a newly formed team or are just having problems motivating a part of your team members, you could probably use some of the advice below. Mind you that all you are about to read comes from the experiences of some of the most well-known companies that manage this domain.

·        Don’t get too stuck on following strict rules no matter what the context. Often enough, some leaders get hung up on the idea that rules have to be followed to the letter, even if common sense dictates otherwise. So it is important before you make strict guidelines to be sure to let room for interpretation when it comes to very specific cases. Leave your leaders room to adapt to any kind of exception. So, if you are a team leader don’t hesitate to think on your own, because anyone can blindly follow rules, but just a real leader knows when and how to adapt to certain particularities of  a specific case.

·        Get your team working at full capacity thru team building exercises. This is a tried and tested method that has been applied in leadership best practices. Any newly formed team will start off slower until each member learns how the others function, and what qualities and defects they have. Furthermore, building trust between team members is usually a long process if the members only interact at work. So one of the easiest solutions for getting a team to work at full capacity from the beginning is taking a few days to practice team-building exercises. These can range from different games that pitch smaller teams formed by a few members of the big team against the others. The games can be diverse and can have a wide array of tasks, and thru constant rotation of the members between these little teams, everyone will get to know everyone else and how to better work together.

·        A very important role in any leader’s attributes is to make each member of the team important, no matter what their role is, and more importantly, to make each of them feel that they are personably accountable for the team’s success. So no member should think that he doesn’t have to know anything about the project as a hole if they do their specific part as they get ordered to. So if everybody knows what the finished product should look like, and everybody feels responsible for the project, than it’s very possible that they will find better ways in which to do their specific tasks so that other members can work easier with that specific part. So communication is encouraged and the whole process is streamlined. The whole isn’t always a sum of its parts; it’s usually more than that. And if every member of the team knows that, than things will go much smoother.

·        Make sure your team is the ideal size. Most people think that the more people you have on the team, each one an expert on a small niche, the faster things will go. That is rarely the case. Most of the times the smaller the team the fewer chances of things going wrong.

·        Get your team out of a rut by proposing higher, harder to reach goals. If you feel that your team’s energy is getting weaker, try to steer them away from easy tasks that tend to get repetitive and focus their energy on more ambitious goals. This is one of the most important leadership best practices.

·        Challenge every team member. Don’t let them get complacent. Always push them to ask the toughest questions or come up with the most ingenious solutions

·        Make team members feel that they take part in projecting what the future of the company looks like. A easy way to do this is by asking team members where they see the company in five and ten years. Post the answers on a whiteboard and brainstorm for new, shared sense of where the company should be headed.

These are just a few simple tips for becoming a better leader. Of course applying them to the letter will not guarantee a perfect outcome. But these are some leadership best practices that have been tried and tested throughout the years at some of the most important companies. So it’s very important to remember some key aspects if you want to become a very good and successful leader. It’s important that your team members feel close to you but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t know who is boss. A very good leader should be loved but at the same time respected, if not feared. 

Incoming search terms:

• best practices associated with team leadership role
• best practices to be a better leader
• what are leadership practices

No related posts.