What Can Managers Do to Support them Better?

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Since the 1990’s team leader (TL) roles have proliferated in companies. Teams have become a hub of organisational work activity and, together with their leaders, an indispensable means to adapt to mounting global competitiveness, through sourcing the most outstanding talent, no matter how geographically dispersed, to collaboratively solve customer problems more innovatively, cost-effectively and timeously. Recently, the most conspicuous demonstration of the benefits of collaborative team work has been in the pharmaceutical industry, which reduced the discovery to trial phase of COVID_19 vaccine development, by nearly two years, as compared with previous timelines.

From my experience with clients from companies across numerous sectors and four continents, it is evident that, irrespective of sector or continent, numerous companies have failed to notice organisational impediments their highly talented team leaders (TLs) face, to lead teams proficiently. TLs are showing warning signs of dysfunctional overload, induced by pressures of time and workload demands. These effects have intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating upheaval in team functioning, and additional challenges, such as job and health anxieties of team members, as work from home is becoming the norm.

Crucially, these difficulties stem from unclarity about their roles and how they fit into the rest of the organisation. On a positive note, how organisations design TL roles, articulate their expectations of them, and support their incumbents, have a direct bearing on possibilities for TLs to bring their best qualities and performances to team situations they find themselves in.

If organisations are to leverage fully the promise of collaborative teamwork, there are three critical facets for managers to attend to.

1) Defining the Team Leader Role Unambiguously

Articulating what they expect of team leaders and how their work will contribute to organisations’ specific strategic goals are key questions to answer. Otherwise, how would managers assess fairly the outcomes produced by teams they lead, and the impact they have on the rest of the organisation?

When these issues remain open questions, puzzled TLs reach for the best explanations available to them, even if incomplete, when asked: ‘What does your manager expect of you?’ By way of example, ‘My manager says he wants nothing less than exceptional work from me’, ‘My manager assesses me on the quality of the team’s work and meeting deadlines.’ ‘My manager tells me I should learn to prioritise work better to produce what our company expects of me.’

Another difficulty they encounter, when role ambiguity prevails, is an inability to frame the tasks they are required to deliver in relation to their organisations’ strategic goals. Positive framing, which evokes meaningfulness and goal-directedness, is motivating to team members to engage with tasks and sustain effort. For the TL to effect collaborative outcomes valued by the organisation, and members to orientate themselves suitably to their leader and each other for this purpose, it is essential that both have clarity about the ambit of their respective roles.

Team Leader Add-On Roles

At one extreme we have functional specialists who have been asked by their managers to simply add on team leadership to their existing jobs demands, without any review of pre-existing task loads.

Their job titles change as a result. In reality little else does. They continue to concentrate on their functional specialist roles, eking out a minute percentage of their time and effort to allocate to team leadership. Inevitably, incumbents experience unmanageable emotional overloads.

Team Leader Technical Manager Roles

At the other extreme, TLs fulfil traditional technical managerial roles, eg. delegation, monitoring and management of work performance, conducting performance appraisals of team members, resolving team conflict and addressing non-performance.  At a comparatively younger age, what is demanded of them is far more involved than what fell to the traditional entry level managers.

2) Understanding How Team Leaders Accomplish Team Tasks

If managers paid more attention to how TLs perform their roles, they would discover what information is revealed about their developmental and support needs. This is a facet few managers have insight into, until the team overshoots deadlines and fails to meet tasks to their expectations. Even if there are no overt signs of under-performance, if team members are just going through the motions, there is a danger that they will be productive in the short-term only, and not produce their best sustained work.

The quality of interpersonal and team relationships can easily be assessed from team members’ feedback. Surprisingly, few companies assess these aspects systematically, and when managers do, they may skirt around giving what they see as negative feedback. As one Departmental Head, in a major European telecommunications company realised: ‘In my conversations with team leaders, the difficult issue hangs in the air, either because it appears contentious, or I am afraid to address it.’

3)  Recognising Team Leadership as an Organisational Rite of Passage

Assumption of a TL role represents a seismic shift from former functional specialist roles. Flattening the hierarchy makes this point no less pertinent. Progressing from managing ones’ own work outcomes, to managing and leading others for the first time, has always been a daunting prospect, even for the most talented employees. Being cognisant of this, in the traditional hierarchy, entry level managerial roles were commonly recognised as organisational passages requiring relatively more significant training and development resources, to improve job performance, especially in managing reporting individuals in their teams. The same consideration is not as widespread for team leadership, and role definition ambiguity contributes to this failure.

These are quite straightforward actions to take, which do not exceed the competence of any good, caring manager, to make team leadership more effective and rewarding for incumbents. Lack of concerted attentional focus to these basic managerial activities can be traced back to the prevailing tension in organisations between abdication of responsibility, and constraining autonomy through micro-managing. Direction setting is fundamental to leadership, and can be executed without dictating specific work content and processes, and undermining individual initiative and creativity.