Team Leadership
By M B Bhatti

LEADERSHIP of teams is always a vital ingredient in the success and effectiveness of any organization. Most of us are familiar with leaders of the political parties only. In the developed world leaders are identified, groomed and utilized at all levels.

There are different definitions of leaders. According to one of the definitions the leader is a person who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do, and like it. It is true that some of the leaders are born leaders but it is also a fact that the skills of leadership can be learned and developed if one wish to put in efforts.

The key traits of leaders are intelligence, initiative and self-confidence. Leaders also act as a motivating force for the employees by helping them attain individual goals that are aligned with organizational goals. They clarified the path that will lead to employee’s achievement.

They provide the necessary guidance and support to get the job done. They also remove the obstacles that block the path to goal achievement and link reward to goal accomplishment.

Highly effective and charismatic leaders manage the following four areas:

Management of attention – the vision of leaders commands the attention and commitment of those who work for and with them in attempting to achieve it.

Management of meaning – the leaders are skilled in communications, able to cut through complexity to frame issues in simple images and language. They are expert distillers of information.

Management of trust – Trust is essential to all organization. For the leaders, trust is expressed through consistency of purpose and their dealings with colleagues and others.

Management of self – the leaders are adept at identifying and fully utilizing their strengths; and accepting and seeking to develop areas of weakness.

The leader can possess, exemplify and perhaps even personify the qualities expected or required in their working group. Without it the leader will lack credibility.

This is one of the first differences between leaders and managers: the latter can be appointed over others in the hierarchy regardless of whether or not they have the required qualities. The real leaders possess the qualities of enthusiasm, integrity, toughness, fairness, warmth, humility, and confidence.

The leaders need to be ever prepared to accept the challenges with confidence. They never write themselves off as a potential leader. It is a question of getting themselves in the right field and then waiting for the right situation.

They should remember the Pasteur’s famous remark that ‘Fortune favours the prepared mind’. The more prepared one is, the more confident one become. One should never forget to look confident.

The leaders are always proactive. They seek opportunities to lead a team or project group. They set the objectives and establish a vision. They set up high performance expectations and displays confidence in themselves and the collective ability to realize the vision. They organize the teams by a clear division of tasks and responsibilities between the management and workers.

They learn and apply the techniques of motivation. The workers cannot be motivated if their hearts and minds are not won. So the leaders should be warm, considerate and well behaved with their workers.

In the present era of science and technology the leaders are required to use scientific methods to determine the best way of doing a job. They should also make sure the proper selection of the person to do the newly designed job. They must coordinate among the workers and resolve their problems. They should not forget the training opportunities for their workers to perform the job in the way specified.

They should not overlook monitoring of the workers through the use of hierarchies of authority and close supervision. After accomplishing a task there is a need to review it in order to identify the left over weak areas so that the mistakes are not repeated and loopholes are plugged for future needs.

The leaders are reflective and insightful as well. The leaders need to be able to withdraw from time to time to take a ‘helicopter view’ of what is going on. The leaders should have the ability to arise above the particulars of a situation and perceives it in its relations to the overall environment. These times of reflection provide chance to the potential leaders to look into their own role performance as a leader.

They list the things that are going well and identify some specific areas for self-improvement. They also use feedback from others but interpret this cautiously looking for a pattern.

The leaders are not afraid of failure. They never loose heart. They are always source of inspiration and optimism for their team members.

Every officer working in Pakistan has got a team to lead. The officers whether they are working in public sector or in a private organization cannot be good managers until and unless they become aware of pre-requisites of leadership and make earnest efforts to realize them within themselves.

[The writer is UK-based expert in Highway Management & Engineering]●

© 2006 M B Bhatti