Virtually everyone has the capacity to take on leadership roles within the workplace. It’s just that some individuals may need to work on skills that sometimes come naturally to others. Constant communication, praise, and making tough decisions quickly and effectively are some key characteristics of good leaders. You may have to do a bit of research on these points and others to hone your leadership skills if you want to become a successful leader among your team members. Here are six useful tips to help you take the helm at work.
1. Learn about Effective Communication
As a team leader, you need to know how to communicate effectively. This means that you must do a lot more than just bark out orders to your team. You need to be able to think about all angles before saying anything, and make sure that people can understand your message. You also need to learn how to listen to what your team members are saying, and be able to manage and even prevent conflicts between team members, or between your team and management (which includes you).
2. Praise Team Members Individually
It is not enough to praise your team for a job well done. It is even more important to praise each team member for their own contributions to projects. Make sure that your praise is authentic. An empty gesture will be noticed even more than true praise, and this will cause you to lose respect from your co-workers. Let them know what impressed you about their work, and they will continue doing the same things.
3. Make People Think
A successful leader knows how to challenge their colleagues, and make them want to work harder. The more they challenge their team members, the more the team members want to meet and exceed those challenges. Just make sure that you know how to challenge them without overworking them or being too hard on them. This will have the opposite effect of what you are trying to achieve.
4. Learn How to Make Decisions
One of the main things a team leader must do is be able to make decisions on the fly. You can’t be wishy-washy when it comes to making decisions. Not only can it hurt the company, it can also hurt you, because it shows that you don’t have what it takes to be an effective team leader. You need to master the art of politics and making decisions, and don’t spend a lot of time over-thinking any decisions you make, or need to make.
5. Engage Others
You will need to learn how to engage others to make sure that your team is as productive as possible. Tasks should be assigned based on your own observations, as well as feedback from team members. When they are being asked how to improve things, and are able to utilize their skills, they will be much happier and much more productive. If there are changes coming, let your team know so they aren’t blindsided. Basically, keep them involved in as much as possible.
6. Know how to Allocate Talent
A good leader knows their employees and their talents, and how to utilize those talents. They know exactly how to bring out the best in their employees, and where they should be in order to be the most effective. As a team leader, you will need to learn about your employees, their skill sets, and how their skills can be best used to make the team more productive and effective. This is going to show your team that you know what needs to be done, and who is best at getting it done.
Featured photo credit: Andrew Neel via unsplash.com
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