Team goals and strategies define the activities that need to be completed for teams to be successful. Be proactive in setting goals, as well as establishing the timelines — and deadlines — necessary to keep yourself and your teams on track. A challenge for team leaders is getting team members aligned around a common worldview. Many of the most common leadership challenges arise when leaders are either unaware of common pitfalls, or are inattentive to developing problems. Your role as a leader is to not get off balance because of change. Different opinions are not a bad thing. Stop blaming organizations and others for your shortfalls and failures. They often arise in periods of instability or change, such when a program or period of work is beginning or ending, or when a group or organization is in transition. Teams rarely if ever get mentioned in the leadership literature, are underrepresented in many leadership competency models, do not make up any of the curriculum in a vast majority of leadership programs, or are taken into account when promoting people or appraising their performance. Being Treated Equally. They come in three categories: external (from people and situations); internal (from within the leader herself); and stemming from the circumstance of being a leader. The end-goal of overcoming manager challenges. One reason why is that many team leaders falsely believe that team member skills, experience, and abilities are all that matters, when in reality there are other team talent considerations. Image : shutterstock Being a great leader means making some very difficult choices, ones which may even go against the very core of your being. Being a leader can be really lonely. Your subordinates will come to you for work and it is your duty to delegate responsibilities. Team leaders who clearly identify the competition and benchmark against their performance, devise strategies to beat the competition, and articulate how individual and collective team members’ efforts contribute to winning have overcome this challenge. Many project managers and team leaders work hard to clarify team values early in the formation process. Conflict, or a difference of opinion, can be healthy and, if carefully managed, it can trigger useful debates. Therefore, don’t underestimate the importance of keeping your staff motivated and engaged. Trust was found to be a key require… If there is one thing team leaders can learn from their athletic coach and military leader counterparts it is teaching their teams how to win. You either have to see it coming and prepare or be able to handle it on the fly because both things are inevitable. Whether individual team members, a sub-set of team members, or the entire team best perform these activities is something most team leaders get wrong. Stepping into a new team often brings the challenge of learning the best way to lead the team. Those that never talk about the competition, have not set goals or strategies to beat the competition, or do not describe how each team members’ efforts contribute to winning fail to meet this challenge. Challenge #5: Leverage Team Norms to Drive Performance. The distractions that you face can make it easy to lose sight of long-term and even short-term goals. 1. The reality is often very different. Nonetheless, a challenge for all team leaders is to ensure the dashboards, scorecards, or KPIs needed to drive team performance are in place and understood by everyone on their teams. Challenge 2: Getting The Buy-In Of People Unless you have followers you are not a leader and not leading a team. It is easy to forget that leadership is a team sport, as most of what gets written about the topic focuses on leaders. If you are taking over a team on which you have been a member, it is very likely that you may have formed some friendships in the course of working together. Team members fail to understand their role in the bigger picture which leads to lack of motivation. It is easier for leaders in some industries (retail, restaurants, and manufacturing) and functions (sales, operations, and customer service) than it is for others to quantify team performance. In understanding the different facets of team leadership, you will learn to build a cohesive and high performing team which can work together to resolve challenges and conflicts. Lack of projects, scarcity of funds and lack of support from clients are some of the external challenges faced by a leader. By allowing everyone to work on a solution using their own education and experience, innovation is encouraged, making it possible to address complex and critical concerns. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” And not everyone will get along. Most of the time team members have a shared understanding of their team’s purpose, but team leaders may need to work through this issue with new or highly dysfunctional teams. Q4. Disengagement is one of the most common issues faced by everyone at workplace. It is important to note that mastering team conflict is not the same as minimizing team conflict. What role do individuals play in your organization’s recruiting, hiring, on-boarding, performance management, succession planning, and compensation systems? There are several external challenges as well in leadership. Employee disengagement is bad for business. Development of leadership qualities: Though being the leader of a team could be a challenge it is also an extremely enriching experience. And by being aware of these challenges, you can put your best foot forward in dealing with them. Other challenges include getting the right reporting structures in place (matrix structures tend to interfere with good teamwork), clarifying team members’ roles and responsibilities, ensuring team behavior and performance is adequately incented, and dealing with team killers. The challenge for team leaders is to make the most efficient and effective use of team members’ time and talents, and this means clearly defining when individuals, sub-groups, or the entire team is needed to get particular tasks accomplished. Yet humans are social animals, and the basic work unit in most public and private sector organizations is the team. 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