In the organizational paradigm, it doesn’t matter whether you’re taking on a new role as a leader of a fresh team or you’re taking control of an old team that has been in the market for a while now, leading a team can be quite challenging and daunting.
Right now, if you’re a new team leading just taking on the role, you might be relishing the challenge you went for or you’re seriously considering putting your head through the wall, or both.
In this article, we will discuss some very useful tips and tricks that will help ease the pressure of being a team leader, and how you can make your team more productive and collaborative to gain more success for you and the company.
Here Are The 6 Useful Tips for New Team Leaders
1. Taking Time Out…
One of the major problems in the market right now are employees or people who have no proper direction about their work currently or what they intend to do in the future. They need guidance. And that guidance has to come from their leaders.
To make your team more productive and effective, their team leader has to spend ample time with them so that you remain visible to the team and they would know that whenever they need guidance about anything work-related, they have to come to you.
Often this task is quite challenging when the team is very large and so a pro tip is to always re-negotiate your workload that you don’t have so many tasks that would crush your spirit.
2. Know Your Squad
Being there for the team is always well and good but you also need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team and for that, you need to get to know them.
This is because leadership is all about influencing your team members but how would you influence them without knowing anything about them. While it’s very tempting to make big moves right out of the gate, you have to remember always that you’re there to help them and the company, and not just inflating your ego.
You need to make sure to listen to everything your team has to say and find out what issues are they facing, what ideas are in their minds to maximize productivity and then you can quantify everything and formulate an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
3. Communicate, Communicate, and Communicate
Once you think that your squad is at its optimum capacity, performance-wise, you need to keep the dialogue going and not stop the collaboration process among yourself and the team.
This will keep the trust factor going and you can assess the progress of everything that is going on inside the company.
Not only that, once all of the team members see you regularly communicate with the team, they’ll also be more open with you in sharing new ideas and strategies to make the production process and other policies related to the company, more effective.
One thing you need to do as a team leader is to appoint responsibilities to the whole squad so that everyone knows what they have to do.
This is a fairly obvious task of the team lead but when you are working with a big team, there are bound to be some bottlenecks as to who has to do what. So, this will help you avoid those obstacles.
4. Lead by Example
Think about everything you want your employees to do and to achieve. The only way you could ever convince them to anything off of that list is to lead them by example.
You’re supposed to be the role model to the whole squad and they will look to you whenever they need any help regarding their work.
One thing you need to remember is that you always have to play to your strengths when you are leading a squad. Because if you lie to them about knowing something that you don’t, they are eventually going to find out and you will lose all of your hard-earned trust and credibility.
You need to be honest and passionate about the stuff you discuss with them. You should treat everyone on your team with respect and a hint of favoritism so that everyone feels acknowledged and a valued part of the team.
5. Reward the Positive Outcomes and learn from the Negative ones
As a team leader, you need to be the first person to recognize the individual performance of the team and reward them accordingly so that they would continue their hard work.
Many a time you might not be in a position to raise their salaries and hand out promotions, but even a positive call-out Infront of the whole squad will do the trick.
That’s all well and good, but you need to be equally fast when it comes to learning from the negative performances of the team members. You need to tackle these negative aspects as soon as you see them.
There is no use in playing the blame game with your team members. Remember that you’re there to motivate them to do their absolute best and not call them out in front of everyone about their mistakes. Accept that the team is human and mistakes are going to happen, and move on.
6. Delegate
As a leader, you should trust your team completely that they would get the work done, no matter what. This doesn’t mean that you set some unreal expectations with them which they can’t get done.
Instead, you should delegate all of the work accordingly so that you can spend your time motivating the whole squad and not do everyone’s work for them.
Conclusion
Obviously, the aforementioned traits and skills are not the only thing expected from a new team leader. There’s a lot more from where it all came from. Hey, if you have been in such a similar position in the past, we’d love for you to share your experiences through the comments section below.
