The Critical Role of the Team Leader

Team leadership plays a critical role in team performance. Team leadership creates the overall tone of the group, motivates members and sets general direction. The most important part of leadership, however, involves helping team members learn to be more effective contributors to the team. Leadership on teams involves two processes. First, leadership involves creating shared beliefs among team members that foster an environment of learning. Second, leadership requires helping team members improve their team work skills.

The Team Leadership Questionnaire provides a comprehensive view of team leadership based on years of research and consulting with hundreds of teams. Mastering team leadership means:

• developing a better understanding of how teams work,
• understanding the various components that, when taken together, constitute team effectiveness
• developing skills that improve your ability to lead a team, and
• developing skills of your team members

What is Team Learning?

Team learning involves a variety of shared beliefs and behaviors that lead to improved performance. As teams work together over time, they develop certain patterns. These patterns may be more or less helpful to the team in accomplishing its day-to-day work. Team leadership involves recognizing which of learning patterns contribute to the overall success of the team and which patterns get in the way.      

These team patterns are often called norms. Norms describe the normal way a team works together. Norms include

• The shared beliefs and attitudes among team members
• The way a team accomplishes its work
• The things a team knows about its members
• The way a team goes about solving problems

Research continues to confirm that work teams with high levels of learning tend to perform better than teams that fail to learn.

Team Leadership through Learning

Team leadership involves building a team in three key areas:

• Interpersonal beliefs,
• Task beliefs, and
• Team learning behaviors

Shared Beliefs: Processes that support team learning

Research shows that when team members share certain beliefs about the nature of their team and teamwork, teams are more likely to learn. Oftentimes, the team leader will help to establish these patterns of shared beliefs. These shared beliefs can be broken down into two categories, interpersonal beliefs and task beliefs:

1. Interpersonal Beliefs - the degree to which a team shares beliefs or values related to other members of the groups feeling, mood or intentions
   • Trust -  the shared perception by team members about the nature of the group and its members (including the leader) regarding the psychological climate, emotional disposition of the group, and the degree of to which members of the group are will to share sensitive information especially as it relates to people’s ability to feel safe to make or admit errors and mistakes, or take challenging or controversial positions without fear of serious repercussions.
   • Interpersonal Understanding – the degree to which team members can recognize and comprehend the emotional states, preferences, skills or relationships of individuals in the group.

1. Task Beliefs - the degree to which a team shares beliefs or values related to the task or problem it faces
   • Roles – the degree to which team members have a distinct division of labor, understand the strengths and weakness of other members, and know the unique skills or tasks assigned to other members
   • Goal Sharing – the degree to which the team members share perceptions that they have a clear and shared goal or common purpose.
   • Task efficacy – the group confidence level, in terms of the how strongly the group members share the perception that they can accomplish the task put forth before them.

Three Types of Team Learning Behaviors

Not all teams learn in the same way. In fact, team learning involves three specific types of behaviors that are shared amongst team members. Team learning involves three distinct behaviors:

1. Coordinating – the seamless, often tacit or unconscious, organizing of diverse roles, coordination of knowledge and responsibility in a teams.

1. Adapting – responding to internal and external demands by adjusting actions and beliefs.

1. Collective problem solving – focusing on problem related activities and working together rather than separately to address specific and defined problems.

Some of the factors that may impact which type of team learning is best to emphasize on your team includes, the composition of the team membership (are they new members? Are they experienced members?), and the type of task that you need them to perform (Is it a complex task? a simple task?).

Achieving team performance through learning 

Taken together, team composition, shared beliefs, task and purpose, and team learning provide a comprehensive model for team effectiveness. Team performance, the outcomes sought by a team can take many forms. Work teams may try to

• Insure quality and safety,
• solve problems,
• create new knowledge,
• improve processes,
• develop individual team members

Team effectiveness can take many forms. Many teams will have multiple goals such as accomplishing their day-to-day tasks and training or developing the skills of team members. In general, teams are effective when they consider at least four types of outcomes:

• Interpersonal development – the development of interpersonal skills, developing the ‘emotional intelligence’ or the ability of team members to understand one another.
• Knowledge creation – improve critical thinking, responding to problems in new and novel ways and creating knowledge or organizing existing information into usable formats.
• Decision making – making decisions or recommendations to others
• Action – taking multiple actions, or solving a simple problem