A team leader is formally or informally recognized as someone who guides, directs, instructs, inspires, and motivates a group of individuals with a common goal to complete a particular project.
A good team leader understands the team’s strengths and weaknesses and what motivates each team member to achieve team objectives.
The team leader role description includes officially assigned tasks and responsibilities that separate one person as a manager. But it can also be earned based on the trust given by the team that the person in question is the most effective one to manage the group.
Do you think you make a good team leader?
The Main Role of a Team Leader
The team leader supervises a group of people, provides instructions for task completion, and monitors performance.
The team leader role can be exclusive, universal, and long-standing such as the one of a CEO. It can be delegated for the purposes of a concrete project to the most qualified team member. Or it can be a dynamic role such as the team lead role in agile teams.
Regardless of the type of the team leader role, the team leader role description must include the following capabilities
- Holding team members accountable
- Building trust
- Giving sufficient work resources, knowledge, and autonomy
- Communicating transparently
- Nurturing team confidence
Apart from incorporating leadership qualities, the team leader must be an impressive strategist and an effective success tracker.
Team Leader Role Description
The Team Leader supervises day-to-day team operations and motivates the team (or stops demotivating them) to create a stimulating team environment. The team leader role represents an example of flexibility and creates a culture of openness and transparency.
If you wonder what responsibilities belong in the team leader role description, here is a summary:
- Set clear team goals. Break down roles into smaller parts, make them specific and measurable, match them with team strengths, provide a sense of accomplishment and learning, and show how relevant they are to business growth.
- Delegate tasks and set frameworks. Delegate interesting tasks and explain why you are delegating to exactly that person, give autonomy alongside responsibility, and provide resources and feedback.
- Monitor team performance. Set clear objectives and key results, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs.). Provide self-monitoring tools.
- Explore training needs and engage in coaching leadership. Decide on relevant training skills for project goals and match team strengths with skills gap and coach from the position of collaboration and empowerment.
- Actively listen to team feedback and resolve conflicts efficiently. Ask explorative, open-ended questions and try to understand team members’ language that drives accomplishment.
- Recognize high team performance. Provide self-rewarding tasks, mark successes, and match member contributions to job accomplishments.
- Encourage creativity and risk-taking. Support innovation, rephrase failures to lessons learned, and incorporate mistakes in contingency planning.
- Recommend and promote team-building activities. Fill the socialization gap of virtual work by running deep work conversations and offering support.
- Engage in strategy-building. Identify competitive advantages, make fact-based decisions, define targets, focus on long-term growth, and be flexible.
- Identify business growth opportunities. Listen to clients, leads, and competitors, and analyze industry trends.
The team leader is a visionary, a strategist, and a talent ambassador.
Essential Team Leader Skills
What skills are entailed in the role description of the team leader?
- Problem-solving. Ability to define a problem, determine the cause, identify and evaluate solutions and implement the most effective one.
- Communication. Empathy, clarity, confidence, active listening, and sharing feedback.
- Effectively delegating tasks. Shifting authority and responsibility for tasks that take time, planning, and effort to another role to focus on strategic and growth opportunities.
- Mediation. Manage conflicts impartially before they escalate by helping people resolve workplace tensions and disagreements.
- Rewarding attitude. Public recognition and appreciation of a job well done.
- Integrity. Being honest, trustworthy, and reliable, owning mistakes, and acting by the word.
- Enthusiasm. Try out new ideas, bravery around new things, and a culture of excitement about being a part of the team.
- Decisiveness. Make clear and final decisions on time with the appropriate amount of information.
Want to be able to adapt the team leader role description to the circumstances, develop your team leader skills, or delegate authority to help your team embrace ownership, accountability, and responsibility?
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