Teams exist in various organizations or groups with specific objectives and roles to attain their goals. The success of any team depends on the effectiveness of interactions among the members, which must involve coordination, cooperation, and proper understanding of one another. A team’s success also requires a good leader to steer the members in the right direction by unifying them and their ideas. The leader must determine proper leadership models to facilitate collaboration and positive interactions to ensure goal attainment. Proper leadership models also allow the leader to quickly and smoothly resolve any conflict among team members. A good team leader should always enhance effective leadership and focus on harmonizing the members and encouraging cooperation by nurturing positive team interactions to facilitate their goals and achieve better results.
Effective team leadership is paramount to achieving various goals by ensuring maximum collaboration. Leaders should possess various features that define effective team leadership, including clear communication, confidence in the team, and respect for the members. According to Hu and Broome (2020), three leadership qualities enhance interprofessional collaboration among team members, including serving as a role model, initiating and maintaining collaboration, and showing benevolence to all team members. A team leader should also show high self-control, determination, competency, honesty, and forward-looking to facilitate good leadership and ensure goal attainment. Effective leadership must also handle stressful situations well, have strong organizational skills, help members understand their goals, and achieve objectives in good time.
Effective team leadership always influences the team members towards a particular direction. A good team leader must build trust with the other members and understand their motivations to influence them to have shared opinions towards an idea. Seaman et al. (2018) note that effective team leadership should display technological innovation, intrinsic motivation, and loyalty to the team. Such leadership should also be flexible in their decisions and allow members to lay their ideas and select decisions with the best results. A good team leader should show transparency to enhance trust, encourage members to take risks and become innovators, and show high integrity and ethical standards.
Effective team leadership must also adopt a good leadership model to enhance team collaboration and interactions to facilitate goal attainment. The transformational leadership model can be quite effective for team leadership because it ensures goal attainment by inspiring and motivating members and being positive and focused on the objectives. Combining the transformational model with distributed leadership is useful for a team leader since the models focus on prioritizing the members’ engagement in working together towards an inspirational shared vision for the future (Letourneau et al., 2021). With the distributed leadership model, the leader will always enhance knowledge sharing and encourage team members to take actions that will result in breakthrough outcomes and achieve their goals.
The team leader should also adopt the charismatic leadership model to facilitate enthusiasm for the team. A charismatic leader depends on communicative and responsive personal characteristics to achieve the team’s goals. The qualities of this leadership model involve value-focused, great communication, responsiveness to other members, and unifying and engaging all team members. Another model that ensures effective team leadership is the ethical model, which enhances honesty, empathy, fairness, and moral principles among the members. The model allows the leader to complement or positively criticize the team members and make rational decisions to facilitate the consistency of the team’s goals. Effective team leadership should also show democracy to motivate the members to work more effectively towards their goals by involving them in decision-making processes.
Team leaders should focus on achieving maximum interactions among the members to facilitate collaboration and goal attainment. An effective team only prospers if the members understand the reasons for their commitment. As a result, the leader should ensure a clear team vision or mission and regularly remind the members why they must meet specific goals. The leader must also communicate the expectation for team collaboration to enhance effective interactions since the members will only work as a team if they understand the reasons. Continuous team collaboration also requires the leader to highlight the members’ strengths and show appreciation for their skills. Such an intervention helps motivate the team members to increase their input and productivity, leading to better goal attainment.
Team members can also engage in more collaborative teamwork when the leader enhances honesty, open communication, creativity, and knowledge sharing. Better achievement of goals can also result from training the team members to properly manage their resources (Buljac-Samardzic et al., 2020). Organizational redesign to restructure an organization is crucial in facilitating team processes and functioning. In addition, a team leader can improve collaboration among members through intentional leadership, clarifying each member’s role, and adopting group problem-solving. Encouraging open dialogues among the team members to solve various problems and positively welcoming change can significantly enhance interactions. Such strategies help the leader to efficiently manage the team without any disagreements among the members, ensuring better goal attainment.
Conflicts are common among team members since everyone will not always agree with one’s idea. However, conflicts are just a few setbacks that require team leaders to be proactive to resolve and allow the members to continue working towards their goals. The first step should involve the leader determining the source of the conflict by speaking to the conflicting parties individually (AMA Staff, 2019). A confidential dialogue with each party allows the leader to hear each side while avoiding assumptions. The leader should look beyond the incident to determine the factors that may have fueled the conflict. Next, the leader should ask each party to suggest the best solution to their conflict. The step should also involve seeking ideas from the other team members, provided the conflict is not confidential and impacts the whole team.
Once the conflicting parties and the other team members have suggested viable solutions and ideas, the leader should then determine those that favor both disputants. Identifying the solutions that favor both disputants is crucial because it will likely have a long-term impact and must be for the organization’s benefit. The leader should always suggest solutions that enhance cooperation and collaboration between the parties and among all team members. The final step involves an agreement, where the disputants accept one another’s compromise and agree to work together for the team’s benefit.
Collaboration and team interactions are the goals of effective leadership, which every good team leader should always enhance by focusing on harmonizing the members and encouraging cooperation. Maximum collaboration and positive team interactions facilitate goal attainment and better team results. A leader should always ensure effective leadership by adopting the best leadership models and characteristics. In addition, the leader must be proactive in resolving conflicts among team members and promoting collaboration for the best results.
References
AMA Staff. (2019). The five steps to conflict resolution. AMA. Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://www.amanet.org/articles/the-five-steps-to-conflict-resolution/
Buljac-Samardzic, M., Doekhie, K. D., & van Wijngaarden, J. D. (2020). Interventions to improve team effectiveness within health care: a systematic review of the past decade. Human resources for health, 18(1), 1-42. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-019-0411-3
Hu, Y., & Broome, M. (2020). Leadership characteristics for interprofessional collaboration in China. Journal of Professional Nursing, 36(5), 356–363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2020.02.008
Letourneau, S. M., Bennett, D., McMillan Culp, K., Mohabir, P., Schloss, D., Liu, C. J., & Honey, M. (2021). A shift in authority: applying transformational and distributed leadership models to create inclusive informal stem learning environments. Curator: The Museum Journal, 64(2), 363-382. https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12418
Seaman, C., LaPerla, J. T., Schwartz, E., & Bienstock, J. E. (2018). Common leadership characteristics, personality traits, and behaviors that generations X, Y, and Z leaders find effective for shared leadership: a formal, informal, and rational approach. JIMS, 18(3). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cristina-Seaman-2/publication/328012431_COMMON_LEADERSHIP_CHARACTERISTICS_PERSONALITY_TRAITS_AND_BEHAVIORS_THAT_GENERATIONS_X_Y_AND_Z_LEADERS_FIND_EFFECTIVE_FOR_SHARED_LEADERSHIP_A_FORMAL_INFORMAL_AND_RATIONAL_APPROACH/links/5ec80a88299bf1c09ad594a2/COMMON-LEADERSHIP-CHARACTERISTICS-PERSONALITY-TRAITS-AND-BEHAVIORS-THAT-GENERATIONS-X-Y-AND-Z-LEADERS-FIND-EFFECTIVE-FOR-SHARED-LEADERSHIP-A-FORMAL-INFORMAL-AND-RATIONAL-APPROACH.pdf
write