Being A Good Team Leader – Dec. 1/14

Being A Good Team Leader

– How I see it –

Dec. 1/14 – I have been told by people who know me that I am a natural leader, with the inherent ability to see through a person very quickly – his motivations in relation to his work.  I am not really sure about this.  But over the years, I have developed a good number of what I think are the leadership skills that my colleagues have seen in me.  These have helped me to lead my team:

– I lead by example.  I just don’t tell them things to do but I show them how to do things.  If I expect them to work hard, then I work harder.  If I expect them to stay on in the office to finish a job, then I stay with them.

– I am realistic in my expectations and in my due dates.  I don’t ask them to deliver what I can’t deliver myself.  I recognize that I don’t know everything.  For these areas, I discuss the work with them so that I know how difficult or how easy the work is and how long the task would take to be accomplished.

– I like to inspire others and hence am always willing to work harder than any other person in the team.

– I can easily recognize each team member’s strength and weakness and so I am able to maximize their talents and tap their potentials, so that at the end of the day, they become better because they have developed new skills and gained new knowledge. I recognize and make them realize that a team is just as strong as its weakest link. By this, everyone gets inspired so that s/he is not tagged as the weakest link which in turn, makes the team stronger.

– I am a very organized person therefore everyone knows I am always on top of everything so they become more cautious and in turn, they become more organized in order to meet my standards.

– My positive energy and spirit rub off to them.  My drive motivates them to work harder to keep up with the team spirit.

– I put credit where credit is due.  I will always pay tribute to those that deserve it as validation can be very inspiring for them to want to work even harder.  I also reward loyalty and punctuality as I know how important they are to run a business successfully.

– I share my value of accountability and the importance of productivity with the team members.  For example, I use a software called Asana, a team task management tool.  This tool allows me to assign tasks to team members with specific due dates, to monitor their progress as there are areas to update and comment on the latest status of their task.  More importantly, Asana gives me the opportunity to  determine which among the team members work most efficiently and according to turn-around-time (TAT). So, it’s very easy for me to monitor productivity level and, for them, to level up to standards and be accountable.

– I am not afraid of making decisions.  My decisions have always been based on calculated risk and, of course, my belief. Then, I stand by own my decision wherever that decisions takes me and my business.

– I am able to separate personal and business and expect that everyone else does it too.  In  my experience, people working in a small company become friends with one another faster than those in bigger companies, or may already be friends even before they become colleagues.  Therefore, they often are not able to draw the line between what is work and what is friendship.  If it’s a boss-subordinate relationship, it sometimes becomes difficult for the boss to call the attention of the subordinate about issues related to work because of the personal relationship that they are protecting.

– What I do is that I make it clear with everyone, right from the very start, that I can be both a boss and a friend, at the right time and the right at the circumstance.

I believe that these are the traits that people have recognized in me that’s why they say that I was born to be a leader.  On my part, I recognize that these have helped me gain all the respect of the teams I have been with.

This I believe is leadership management: setting an example for others to follow, serving as a resource person in resolving company issues, and having the ability to perform proper risk management.

I always walk my talk.