Leading a team is deepening your leadership beyond leading the individuals within it. Way too often we speak of leadership skills as a skillset to handle other people but when leading a team it is important to remember that is not the full deal. Leading a team is actually also exactly what the phrasing says / leading the team.
A team is a group of people. A group of individuals with different skills, needs and personalities and as their leader of course you need to keep them all in mind but that is not enough. There is an extra persona to lead, the team itself. Every group of people builds up to something extra, the dynamic of the individuals coming together. Leading on this systemic level is leading that dynamic.
How do I lead a team persona?
One way of seeing it is seeing the team in itself as yet another person to lead. A persona with its’ own needs and traits. Disconnect yourself from looking at the individuals and look at them on group level. What does your team become as a group? More courageous? Cautious? Perfectionist or cutting corners? Excelling or slacking? Being part of a group affect individuals, group think sets in, personal responsibility diminishes, a sense of strengths together kicks in, all kinds of things happen to us as parts of a group. No team ends up the same and no team stays the same. What kind of persona is your team? What traits can you see? How would you describe that persona and how would you lead it?
Once you have identified your team persona you can apply a lot of your usual leadership skills on it on group level, addressing the team itself and seeing the individuals in it as traits of the team. This is not to be mistaken for always speaking to the group. Every now and then you may need to address individual team members on behalf of the team but in leading the team you do so still focusing on group level needs. What you are asking for may be against the at hand needs or wishes of the individual but in benefit of the team. For example you may have some more experienced team members and some still learning. The experienced ones may prefer working together but team performance will increase quicker if they split up and train the newer ones.
Seeing and valuing needs of team members and team persona, weighing them together to optimize output on both group and individual level is multiple level work. We all have biases towards primarily looking at team level or at individual level. A good resource to support your development here is to have a coach and work specifically on the topic of team leadership for a while. Your coach can help you identify your bias and hold you to seeing wider perspectives in your thoughts and decision making. By exploring alternative scenarios prior to actually communicating messages in your team you bring security and clarity to your team while learning to balance the levels.
Three perspectives on how to lead a team
One perspective is to directly lead your team by addressing the team itself. Stepping out of individual leadership and leading on systemic team level is an impact key, especially when you get the swing of moving between individual and team level. Being a good leader on both levels is extremely powerful. You do not lead your team through the individuals only, there is also a need for group level conversations and actions.
A second perspective is indirectly leading through facilitating processes that make it easy to do the right thing in your team. By looking at workflows and processes and adjusting them you can change conditions and changes in team performance and culture follows. People tend to prefer to be right and in line with what is around them. By identifying and eliminating the hiccups in your processes you can affect your team. A metaphor to understand the concept I have found helpful is thinking of the team as streaming water. Water picks the easiest way in the moment, creating meandering floods through the landscape but quickly changing it#s course when someone digs a canal or builds an embankment. Similarly you can affect the flow of your team by facilitating processes heading in the direction you want the team to go.
A third perspective is to lead through designing the environment. By changing factors in your team environment you can create changes in your team. When you have identified changes you would lie to see in your team, have a look at the environment around it. What is promoting the change you want to see, what is blocking it? Maybe you want improved communications within your team. Where, when and how do they communicate now? What would be helpful tools? Maybe a co-operative digital platform is what you need, maybe a simple log book notepad on the cash desk will do the trick. Maybe you want to improve team spirit. Refurnishing or moving your water cooler can create new flows of daily life that stimulates new team behaviors. Picking the right spot to have your annual kick off is a one day wonder but if your daily environment signals something else it quickly rubs off.
Two ditches to stay out of in team leadership
There are two very logical and oh so common ditches to steer away of when working team leadership: Getting caught in individual corners and being to general.
Sometimes team members are strong on expressing individual needs and wishes and make them sound like group ones. You can get hijacked by individuals using the group cover to secure own winnings. Or maybe you have a personal bias towards taking care of the individuals that blocks you from noticing that you are loosing track of the group and only working on individual level. These are examples of factors that tend to push you towards the ditch of getting caught in individual corners. instead of having the team perspective you are caught in a close look at individual level.
The other ditch to watch out for is being to general when working on team level. Working on group level contains some generalisations but if you go to far there you will be circling in a helicopter high above your team, looking at them from a distance that can be suitable when looking for patterns in a full population, but not touching anyone on a personal level. This is a level well suited for statistics on workplace behavior but you will not see your actual team and the people that constitutes it. Being too general makes you a vague leader. You could also end up in this ditch if you have a strong tendency to see the group and in that makes you team members feel unseen because you are always addressing things on group level.
Key to successfully leading your team is being able to balance systemic and individual level and being able to see your team persona and its’ needs. No team stays the same. it changes with members leaving or entering but it also changes as it grows in experience, people within it develop and external factors change.
As a leader you are well advised to look at: What are the traits of this specific team right here, right now? Where are we heading? What does it need? How do I lead it? The scale of independence can be a helpful tool to identify and understand where your team is and what you might want to do to move them.
Remembering you are also part of what you are looking at here it is often wise to take some leadership coaching every now and then to detach yourself and be able to see the wider perspective.