Your Guide to Project Management Best Practices

Team Leadership as a Driving Force for Project Success

by · Published · Updated

project success through team leadershipFor business companies, project success is like a race in which they participate to earn a competitive advantage. Effective team leadership and management is an opportunity for those companies to win the race and get the prize – project success… Team leadership theories and team management practices focus us on creating a work environment where team members can easily collaborate with each other, jointly work on achieving shared goals, and efficiently produce results in teamwork. Effective team leadership is also the starting point for a project manager to begin achieving success. It’s the end point of PM activities to benefit from the project that has been successfully delivered and accomplished. Let’s find out Team leadership activities make it possible to motivate teams towards almost hopeless project efforts and engage people on doing things that seem to be impossible.

Unfortunately it is hard to find leaders and managers who have really good team leadership skills and are able to efficiently meet team challenges. I believe there are several major challenges that often remain unsolved throughout the lifecycle of any project. Those challenges make projects more complicated and therefore increase the probability of failure. Let’s see three team leadership tips that can help you handle any challenge in your project.

Tip #1: Always Set Clear Objectives

My experience in team leadership and management has taught me not to be too reckless and jump into my conclusions regarding team training. I’ve participated in 25 projects for the last several years, and some of my projects with clearly identified objectives have had a 75% higher chance of success than those with unclear and ambiguous goals descriptions.

Why haven’t group leaders just clarified objectives and created a clear description of teamwork? Perhaps the reason is that those leaders have never regarded team leadership development as one of primary driving forces of project success.

So my first suggestion for people involved in managing human resources is to focus on motivating their teams, efficiently delegating their duties, and setting team goals. By clarifying team objectives, the members of your team will get a better understanding of how to use their abilities to deliver the objectives and contribute to achieving project success. Use interviews, meetings, workshops, and other ways of communicating with you team to clarify the goals.

Tip #2: Translate the Objectives

Once your team objectives are clearly set they should be translated for the team. This is not just about repeating the objectives again and again until team members get the right understanding. It is about effective team leadership that ensures delivery of the objectives to minds of team members. As a team leader, you must explain how to achieve project success, in a clear and insightful manner. The way for you to do this is to ask right questions, respond to feedback, and be respected by your team members.

In order for you to achieve effective team leadership and build trustworthy relationships with your group, try to be honest and open to every team member (this will help earn the team’s respect) and use the simplest possible words and expressions to explain the objectives, how to achieve project success and what collaborative goals are. Perhaps, you will need to get some training to learn how to translate the objectives for your team – this will depend upon your current level of team leadership skills and abilities

.

Tip #3: Focus on Results

No matter which team leadership styles have been used, one of the most frequent mistakes refers to getting distracted with thousands of non-essential details. Team leaders haven’t focused their teams on the right direction, so the teams have dispersed their efforts, and no expected results have been produced. This mistake is often made by people responsible for virtual team management.

I suggest you use a kind of project tracking software to keep track of collaborative tasks and focus team members on the right direction throughout the project. Such software will simplify virtual team leadership and give you tools for managing teamwork and group expectations. You can use it to proactively communicate with the team, stay focused on their assignments, and measure project performance.

Tags:

Daniel Linman

Daniel is a business analyst for a Canadian software company. He has worked on various IT projects but is most interested in systems architecture and software development. In his free time, Daniel enjoys playing the guitar, loves going for hikes, and spending time with his family.

You may also like...