Reflection #1 : Global Leadership Lab

Building, Managing and leading effective team

My learning from this session on effective team management are as follows:

• Respect Diversity – Diversity in terms of values, skill sets, culture, experience. Leaders must appreciate commonalities and make an effort to set an environment to share diverse values which often add on the team values. Incorporating people with diverse backgrounds and making them feel part of a team is crucial for team success.
• Management versus leading is very important. Leaders role is to make people enthusiastic, regulate enthusiasm in the team, acknowledge people and their decisions to contribute toward organizational success. While management involves controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers, not power and control.
• Be aware of employees’ unspoken feelings. Set an example to team members by being open with employees and sensitive to their moods and feelings. In fact, one of the most valuable qualities of a good leader is a high emotional quotient (EQ) and the ability to read people’s emotions and empathize with others.
  

  Emotional Intelligence or EI is referred to as the ability to recognize , evaluate and regulate your own emotions, emotions of those around you and groups of people.

• Clear Communications: Leaders should be approachable, relatable, have faith in team and always have an eager to take team ahead. Moreover, communication with the team is crucial for understanding individual team members and ensuring goal cohesion and high morale.
• Empowerment: Bringing people together is not enough, empowering the team is what makes a true leader. In addition to enabling team members with resources and skills, leaders should instill confidence in the people which is possible only with maximum level of interactions with them. That means, for leaders more human interaction essential for understanding each other which will eventually led to the betterment of the team.
• Encourage trust and cooperation among team members. As the team begins to take shape, pay close attention to the ways in which team members work together and take steps to improve communication, cooperation, trust, and respect in those relationships.
• Delegate problem-solving tasks to the team. Let the team work on creative solutions together.
• Acknowledge skills of the team. Be realistic of team’s capacity to achieve team goal.
• Establish team values and goals; evaluate team performance. Be sure to talk with members about the progress they are making toward established goals so that they get a sense both of their success and of the challenges that lie ahead.
• Culture of consensus. Set objectives, solve problems, and plan for action. While it takes much longer to establish consensus, this method ultimately provides better decisions and greater productivity because it secures every team members’ commitment to all levels of the work.