The Biggest Challenges and Opportunities of Leading a Team

Leadership is a great privilege that involves tremendous responsibility. Creating and supporting great managers is a difficult task for any company, but corporate effectiveness coaching is essential for their success. Here are some key, but difficult principles that leaders must master.

Setting a Vision

A leader’s primary job is to lay out a clear and simple vision for achieving goals and communicating them to their staff. This sounds simple, and in some ways it is. But it’s human nature to complicate and over-explain strategies. Great managers think in concise and catchy branding statements and communicate them effectively to their teams.

 

Getting Everyone Invested

Beyond communicating a vision, it’s imperative to get people excited about it! Great managers both lead and inspire. They find the brightest points of any tactic and set about getting their employees engaged in making it happen. This isn’t always easy, but it’s important. It’s okay to let your team know that sometimes the work is impactful and fulfilling. At other times, it may be a “punch-in/punch-out” situation. It’s crucial to create buy-in among employees for both scenarios.

Assigning and Delegating

A strong manager confidently assigns tasks to their subordinates. The art of this comes in finding the balance between delegating effectively and offloading undesirable duties. It’s also critical for managers to not simply say “I’ll do it myself” when times get tough. This doesn’t help anyone. It creates a feeling in eager employees that they are not good enough, and it gives sub-par employees an excuse to slack.

Enforcing Accountability

Lastly, a good leader must hold their employees accountable. This is a non-issue when things are going well, but if you have an under-performer, you must impress upon them the need to improve and the consequences for failing to do so. And you must do this fairly and uniformly.

Leadership is not always what it’s cracked up to be. But mastering these skills will give you a road map to do it well.