Leadership Team Development: Improving Team Performance Through Leadership
What do these three words mean, leadership team development? Take a moment to visualize each word independently so that you can begin to construct a picture of the meaning. Individually, each word has a significance by itself, together they become stronger as do teams.
Leadership team development works to increase output at higher levels. Leadership team development is the process of improving team performance through leadership. This is a growing area of concern because organizations are increasingly turning to more complex team networks and supporting these teams through knowledge management systems to increase performance and efficiency.
Why Leadership Development is a Concern
This is an evolving concern as members join groups with the expectation they are able to perform from the onset with little direction from management. This is an opportunity for leaders to step up and outline organizational goals and motivate followers to act accordingly. An important responsibility of leadership is taking the time to develop people within the organization, so they can be successful on changing teams.
Maximizing Strengths and Reducing Weaknesses
The assumption is that members possess specific skills when joining an organization. Leaders must take the necessary time to identify organizational strengths and weaknesses.
At this point, it is important to develop a strategy to maximize strengths while reducing weaknesses. This is an area that teams can be particularly valuable, especially when the team comes from a diverse background. When the team is made with individuals possessing unique skills, they can take advantage of opportunities using their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses as each member provides value in a complementary manner.
Investing in Team Development
Leaders hold the key to team development. It starts by empowering team members to act and respond to information. Leadership team development builds upon the fundamental elements of teamwork.
Certainly, a leader makes a difference to the ability of the team to function. However, an organization that accomplishes greats feats while the leader is gone is even more remarkable. For example, any championship sports team has in game leadership to accompany the coach on the sideline. The coach develops an organizational culture that inspires team members to take ownership and responsibility of the outcomes for both, themselves and other members. This responsibility comes across as accountability for team contributions and specific tasks. Through leadership team development, a leader creates an environment that promotes high levels of performance and rewards followers through recognition.
Teams face changing internal and external factors that may influence team performance. One of the ways to overcome team stress is through training and working with one another for a period of time. Understandably this is not always possible and limits the potential of team performance.
Moreover, leadership team development is not solely about the ability to build and assemble a team. Even so, leadership team development also concerns the leader’s personal development as a leader. When serving as a leader, you have a responsibility to learn information and acquire fresh skills. The act of learning as a leader is not solely focusing on present times but leading toward the future by identifying opportunities.
To counteract this future inevitability it is important for leaders to establish standards and provides the necessary training to all members upon joining the team. The leader who provides training and establishes standards can substitute team members in an interchangeable fashion. Organizational leaders must invest in team development and themselves. The benefit that comes from the mastermind of group cohesion comes after devoting resources to support those individuals on the team.
Furthermore, providing members with valuable experiences and transitioning them to other teams for other purposes allow additional members to reap the value from these high-performing teams. Team member movements also open the door for new leaders to be accountable.
Conclusion
Leadership team development is a growing concern. Followers are frequently put on teams to accomplish specific tasks. After completion of these tasks, teams disband only for leaders to assemble new teams for another task. Due to complicating measures from internal and external stressors, it is important for leaders to develop followers, so they are accountable and have the propensity to act. This propensity to act comes from training and experiential learning. Members are more likely to respond to different stimuli when they receive training and possess the necessary experiences.
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