Leading Teams Of Individuals: What You Need to Know?

Leading teams is not just a skill; it’s more than overseeing a group of people. Team leaders must guide each individual through the journey while creating a collaborative environment in which to work as a team.

According to a study, Exploring the Dual-Level Effects of Transformational Leadership on Followers, leadership is important at the group and individual levels. In fact, both sets should be addressed at the same time.

Good team leaders understand that to be successful, they not only have to lead the group as a whole but also have to provide leadership for each individual within the group. 

This study of 60 leaders and 203 team members, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is unique in the way it simultaneously examined leadership at the individual and group levels. Most empirical studies do one or the other, but rarely both at the same time.

This way, team leaders can improve the team’s performance by personalized behaviors.

How Team Leading Works 

Leading a team or individuals is all about establishing and following a leadership style. The style should accommodate the group’s needs as well as the individual needs of the team members. 

In this way, we can achieve higher team performance, and the employees will also grow personally, feeling motivated and valued in the organization.

Here’s how effective team leaders work:

• They take time to understand each individual’s skill levels, personal goals, and challenges, to tailor objectives for them, and provide feedback where necessary.
• Effect leaders make sure the whole team is on board with the organizational goals, values, and vision to build a cohesive team that collaborates and takes credit for its achievements.
• They also balance individual-focus and team-focus behaviors and use them to teach individuals personal tasks and organize the whole team to achieve the ultimate goals.
• They keep everything transparent, communicate openly with all the group members, and encourage them to share their ideas and feedback. This creates a collaborative work environment.
• Lastly, they are flexible in adapting their approach to the team’s requirements and challenges.

The Role of Transformational Leadership

The study found that individual-focused leader behavior was positively related to personal initiative and individual task performance. In contrast, group-focused leader behavior was positively related to group performance and helping behavior at the group level. 

Another unique thing about this study is that the authors did a good job explaining the managerial implications of their findings, which is all too rare in academic studies. Here is their explanation:

… today’s leaders are expected to lead individuals and groups at the same time. Our study indicates that team leaders need to display different sets of behaviors to motivate individual followers and teams as a whole. To enhance individual performance, leaders need to set challenging goals and express confidence in their followers’ ability to attain these goals, be a coach and mentor, stimulate followers to be creative and consider new ideas and approaches, and provide timely recognition of achievements. To drive team performance, leaders need to foster group identity by emphasizing the shared values and unique characteristics of the group. Leaders should communicate a compelling vision to team members and build followers’ commitment to the vision. At the same time, leaders need to encourage cooperation and build trust among members to ensure that they work effectively as a team. (pp. 1140-1141)

When developing your future leaders, ensure they are learning how to manage both groups and the individuals in those groups. Good team performance will always require individual and collective effort, and good team leaders must know when and how to display the right behaviors at the right time. 

That will always be easier said than done, but good team leadership is usually the result of good training, not wishful thinking.

Conclusion

The ability to lead individuals and groups together is critical for a team leader’s success. This is why leaders need to adopt a balanced approach to driving individual and team success in a collaborative and constructive environment.

This is what transformational leadership is all about! Invest in training your team members and giving them the skills, knowledge, and expertise to bring out the best results for them and the organization.

---

Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Management at The University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his doctorate in Business Administration at Oklahoma State University. Bret blogs about leadership and social business at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.