Building Teams that Endure: Empowerment, Relationship, and Communication
Effective Leaders Foster Community and Build Effective Leadership Teams
While living the organizational vision and upholding its values help to create a good working atmosphere, building and developing the team is the most significant task of the leader. Using a high degree of team ownership and participation, the leader builds a structure that is truly participatory and open to mutual ownership.
Leaders must be intentional to build a team and culture. It begins with a foundational recognition of the role of team members. To obtain extraordinary results in organizations, leaders understand that everyone is very important, not just the leader. Furthermore, executive leaders build and operate through their own leadership team. This leadership team represents a microcosm of the organizational community. Once established as the heart of the enterprise, teams duplicate throughout the organization. “Team” becomes the way the organization operates. The leader accepts the incompleteness of himself [or herself] as an opportunity, knowing that the team entity will fill in the gaps, as needed. Strong relationships among the leadership team exemplify this value throughout the organization, which then flows into the community.
Robert Dale devotes a chapter in his book Pastoral Leadership to building strong teams, likening them to geese flying in V-formation. The lead goose, taking the brunt of the wind pressure, constantly changes places with the other geese flying with him to conserve its energy. In the same way, the organizational community shares and participates in the role of leadership.
Effective Leaders Have Good Relational Skills, Marrying Task-Completion with People-Orientation
The Stratton Associates, consultants for executive job placement in Sherman Oaks, California, listed thirty-four traits in their personal evaluation outline of potential top-level business executives. Fourteen of the thirty-four traits (over 40%) describe relational skills, as compared to only a few traits that concern intellectual strengths and abilities. Relational skills include maturity, warmth, openness, vulnerability, objectivity, and candor. They also clearly communicate their own limitations, admit their need for others, and demonstrate a deep respect for the aspirations of others.
Robert Rosen elaborates in his book, Leading People, that organizational relationships are crucial. They are “the glue that holds the enterprise together, connecting its strategy, structure, systems, and technology.”
Rosen later observes that good leaders socialize with staff members. Effective executive leaders ought to establish relationships by caring for, serving, and valuing all team members, demonstrating connection, communication, and cohesion. Relationships based on value and trust will maximize human capital across the spectrum of work fields.
Effective Leaders Possess Exceptional Communication Skills
Effective leaders clearly articulate the organization’s vision and mission to all stakeholders. A plethora of research reveals that when leaders effectively communicate their vision, constituents report significantly higher levels of job satisfaction, motivation, commitment, and productivity. Using honed communication skills, leaders listen, articulate vision, and express the heart of constituents, painting a picture of the future, outlining strategic goals, and openly sharing the current state of affairs.
Exponential leaders make a conscious commitment to self-improvement, to learn such skills and discipline themselves to practice the process, holding themselves accountable for communicating effectively with their constituencies.