Strategies for building effective leadership teams

It’s said that no man is an island, and the same is true for any organisation. Successful groups are comprised of a variety of individuals, each working within their own niche. These separate actors must merge into something greater than the sum of their parts, and that’s where leadership teams come in.

Supervisors, managers and chief officers all form part of a leadership team. Think of this like a ship: You have sailors hoisting the sails, cleaning the decks and manning artillery. While a boat can’t sail without these essential crew members, you still need a captain, navigator and first mate to oversee these activities and provide instruction. This is your leadership team.

While you may not be sailing the high seas looking for a bounty to loot, you still need to create a leadership team that can manage other teams across the organisation effectively. You must understand the basic ingredients of strong leaders and the recipes used to create strong management teams. Let’s take a look at effectual leadership skills and some strategies for building good leadership teams.

What leadership skills make for a good leader?

Every first-class leadership team member possesses a number of key traits. Here are five:

• Motivation: Leaders must be committed to their work and inspire the same dedication in their juniors working below them. Without a motivated leader, teams won’t exactly feel encouraged to work hard.
• Positivity: It’s critical that a leader is optimistic to motivate other employees, especially when the going gets tough. It’s not always smooth sailing and leaders must help their team weather the storm.
• Compassion: Ruling with an iron first won’t get you very far. Powerful leaders demonstrate empathy and understanding. They can resolve issues through positive reinforcement rather than punishment and know how to support their team.
• Vision: Brilliant leaders have the ability to see the bigger picture and guide others and provide direction accordingly. Not every worker will understand how their role fits into the greater scheme of things, and good leaders provide this clarity.
• Communication: It takes two to tango and good relationships are a two-way street. Successful leaders understand the importance of both listening to employees and conveying information to them clearly and constructively.

Leadership teams are only as effective as the individuals within them.

Team building strategies for successful teams

You can use fun activities to encourage leadership teams to put aside their egos and work together to overcome a challenge. These ventures might even show you any chinks in the team’s armour and how to mend them:

• Escape rooms: This is a great way to force people to work together to achieve a common goal. Team members must solve puzzles to escape a fictional predicament. Typically, every riddle will test a unique skill. You can discover what talents and abilities every leader has and put those to use in future.
• At-home survivor: Simply use your imagination to create a scenario in which your team is stranded and let each person choose five objects they’d ideally have with them and explain why. This sheds light on how everyone thinks about survival and resources in a low-stakes environment.
• Guessing games: It’s as important to discover our weaknesses as it is to identify our strengths. Use a combination of 30 Seconds and Charades to create a game in which participants have to use non-verbal cues within a time limit. This can help to highlight potential communication shortcomings.

After the activity, everyone can rate themselves and each other (anonymously) according to strengths and weaknesses and give everyone the chance to explain what they did well and what they could have done better.

Interested in doing a team building activity on a budget? Check out our DIY team building course or contact us to find out how we can help your team.