Introduction to leadership
Leading the team to completing the task
The role of team leader is definitely not the easiest of roles, as you are still part of the team but yet you have the satisfaction of developing and motivating the team to success.
You will of course bring the skills and experience of your previous role and will most probably apply these skills to your new team to lead them to success.
When you become a team leader the first step is to understand your new role and responsibilities and what part you play in delivering the overall departmental plan.
It’s important for team leaders to show that they are capable of understanding and carrying out the required tasks through communication, monitoring and organisation - Communication and organisation is crucial for the team to perform and complete the task successfully.
So, if you are a team leader in a contact centre leading a frontline phone team your task will be to ensure that you answer calls within X seconds with a percentage of loss of X percentage.
Each day you will need to communicate yesterdays results and feedback on what you think you could do better as a team today. You will need to make sure that all the team members understand what is required of them for the day.
You will need to monitor performance throughout the day, as it’s your responsibility to complete the task. The team will become motivated in completing the task, as they will soon see that you are leading them to success and they will take pride in their role, which will boost self-motivation of the team member.
In my experience, the main cause of demotivation in team members is because the team didn’t understand what was expected of them and they had very little development time invested in them.
The hard part of the team leader role is maintaining this level of communication and organisation daily. When this becomes a routine for you, team leading will then become much easier.
