The Top 10 Leadership Strategies to Create Winning Teams
A winning team has a strong sense of teamwork. Building a winning team takes more than getting a group of people with the right mix of professional skills to work together. They must blend and move in harmony like a well-oiled machine. They are highly productive, communicate efficiently, collaborate, and innovate in an environment of mutual respect. A winning team always has clear goals, strong leadership, and diplomatic means of conflict resolution. As a leader, you know you have a winning team when everything is well organized and everybody knows their duty. But this is easier said than done.
What do leaders do to achieve this goal for the business?
Well, hiring great talent is good; delegating to allow autonomy is great for motivation. Nevertheless, what is better is being present as a harmonizing influence to ensure the group works well and focuses on the priorities. Gaining such levels of success takes excellent leadership skills and effort on the part of the leader. According to indeed.com, leaders of successful teams ensure that all members have fulfilled their assigned duties. Luckily, there are some strategies that help leaders to create a winning team. These are ten time-tested tips that can apply to building organizational teams with employees as few as five to as many as thousands.
1. Build on Strengths
One trait common among leaders with high-performing teams is that they consistently encourage members to use their strengths every day. They focus on building the talents of the people around them. Recent studies indicate that strength-based leadership boosts the performance and output of employees in workplaces. In addition, another research by Liquidplanner shows that building on the strengths of team members is more effective in elevating performance than trying to improve flaws. Carry an audit for your team and assign them accordingly.
2. Foster Psychological Safety
The number one struggle for employees in workplaces is the thought of underperforming, failure, and making mistakes. Psychological safety ensures that the team can work without worry and fear of the consequences of such incidences. As a leader, creating space for vulnerability helps with this. Leaders who practice vulnerable leadership build trust among members, thus, creating winning teams. For instance, leaders who use suggestion boxes or anonymous messaging applications, receive continuous streams of feedback and truly understand their team members. As a leader, you should seek feedback, listen, and show that failure sometimes happens. According to the advisory board, leaders build winning teams by motivating their members that a mistake is not a sign of defeat but a step towards growth.
3. Manage Conflict
Teams that perform do not necessarily run without friction. Disagreements are natural in-group settings. Depending on how you deal with them, they produce either positive or negative outcomes. When you deal with them openly and fast, they strengthen and bring the unit closer. Although avoiding conflict is the best, high-performing teams may engage in conflict that is productive and healthy. According to tools-here, leaders of winning teams solve conflict using various styles such as compromising, collaborating, and competing.
4. Build Relationships
Leaders of winning teams build professional capacity through good work relationships. At the heart of effective relations are trust, acceptance, and open communication. Tap into your emotional intelligence to improve your interactions with colleagues.
5. Encourage Team Communication
Teamwork is necessary to create a high-performing team. Typically, people grow closer through interaction. Therefore, encourage open and honest conversations where everyone can express their opinions without fear of reproach. Leaders who encourage effective communication among team members in the workplace often yield favorable outcomes such as greater agility, smoother team building, increased focus, diminished workload, and efficient performance. According to Forbes, leaders ought to improve the quality of communication in the workplace, to ensure that members have purposeful communication, which is key for creating a winning team.
6. Manage Time and Productivity
For teams to be successful, time management and productivity must be a priority. Juggling multiple tasks and working under pressure or remotely can often lead to stress and wasted time. However, there are ways to help streamline workflow and improve overall productivity. Watch the video to learn how:
By learning how to manage your time efficiently, you can help your team achieve its goals.
7. Establish Ground Rules
It is vital to lay down rules for operation even more, where you are dealing with a cross-cultural team. These include decision-making, reporting, communication, and frequency of meetings. The uniformity accorded by the guidelines will help reduce friction. A report by Harvard shows that leaders who set ground rules and consistently enforce them are likely to create winning teams because the rules can substantially improve how the team makes decisions and solves problems.
8. Manage Diversity
Leading a diverse group is inevitable. Differences play a significant role in breaking down team cohesion. If you are to build a solid team, prioritize managing the work culture to accommodate the diverse people on your team. According to PeopleScout, leaders who can successfully manage diversity in the workplace are likely to have a competitive advantage over others due to enhanced innovation, differentiation, and employer branding.
9. Be a Team Member
Do not forget to be present. Leading from the front is an excellent approach to leadership that allows the team leader to be a role model and maintain effective communication. When a team leader guides by behavior rather than words, the members are inspired and emulate their leader, thus creating a winning team.
10. Evaluate Progress
A leader is a facilitator. That means you periodically check to ensure everyone is still on track with his or her role and contribution to the goal. The evaluation keeps teams in line and guarantees results. A leader can use various tools to evaluate the performance of their employees to ensure that they become more successful and stay ahead of the competition. These evaluation tools include key performance indicators, performance appraisals, 360-degree feedback, personal development plans, and management by objective.
Conclusion
Even as you strive to build a winning team, remember that most go through the stages of development before they start to produce efficiently. The model by Bruce Tuckman presents these as forming, storming, norming, and then performing. In addition, for a leader to develop a winning team, they must be part of the team and guide by example.
