Team leadership is essentially a whole other video course one that I very much hope to produce at some time. But it's worth saying a few words about what I consider to be the core essentials of good project team leadership as part of this course. So let's have a look at them. My assertion, lying at the heart of all of this is that you will get the team you deserve. Which is not to say if you're a good person, the universe will reward you with a good team and if you're a bad person, universe will punish you with a bad team. It would be lovely if the universe will fare like that isn't what I mean by this is that If you're given a team and your first responses are, I didn't want this group I wanted that group.
They're brilliant, you're rubbish. If that's your first response, if you immediately think the project is doomed because the people I've got, then the project is doomed, because the people you get will know that you feel that way. You'll easily find fault with the little mistakes they make that will depress them motivation, they will live down to expectations, and you will get a self fulfilling prophecy of a bad team. But on the other hand, if you take a look at the team you've got and you say, this is the best team I could possibly have got and I am committed to investing my time my energy, my commitment into making this the best team I can then they will sense that and they will reward that and you will look for the things they do that are good and you will stop the things that they do good at you'll have a great team.
So if you are To invest your time, your energy, what you invested in. I think there are four essentials to great team leadership. And the first is the individual, a team is made up of individuals. The strength of any team is in its diversity. So get to know each person and to value them for what they can offer, rather than what we more easily do, which is to deprecate people for what they can't do or what they do badly. Find out what people's strengths are and as best you can play to them.
Find out what people's aspirations are and feed them. give them opportunities to learn. Make sure you invest in giving them developmental experiences and help them along the way and praise them and reward them and recognize their contributions. The second essential is a team needs a plan it needs to play to have confidence in its leader. But the plan is best when you develop it with the team rather than impose it upon them. Not just for the obvious reason that you get higher levels of commitment from people to a plan that they have contributed in developing fundamentally because if you engage with your team to develop it, you get more minds, more thoughts, more diversity channeled in to thinking out a better plan.
The third, the third key thing is the team itself. Do what it takes to encourage a sense of team coherence. And I'm not talking about Outward Bound building bridges across waterfalls and all of that stuff, which is great fun, but not always particularly useful to workplace teams. Do things together as a team that create little rituals like a regular Monday morning team review, regular Thursday afternoon lessons, learn sessions, celebration sessions. Maybe socializing together by going out for a drink or a meal once a month, maybe recognizing people's birthdays with a cake. Very simple things create powerful sense teams.
Because a team is a group of people that collaborate together to achieve a shared goal. So emphasize the collaboration emphasize the shared goal. And the fourth essential is communication. When I started leading teams, I thought communication was very important. And I thought it was all about me communicating what I know to the team, because I knew that when I was in project teams, I wanted to be well informed by my project managers. I thought the best project managers were the ones that treated me with respect and informed me as much as they could.
And the worst ones are the ones that held the information close to them. The problem is that If you do that, and you lead your team, well, they come to know more than you do. And when your team knows more than you do, and actually, that kind of communication doesn't work, you've got to spend more time listening to your team and having an inward flow of communication, rather than an outflow, because that's what gives you the knowledge to disseminate. The trouble with that structure is you become the hub of all the incoming and outgoing information, the project becomes dependent on you, and you become the key critical point of failure. What if you're off what if you're out visiting another project? What if you're ill?
What if you holiday? So for me, the key to good project team communication is to create a culture as a team leader of sharing information amongst the T. If there is a regular team meeting it happens whether or not the team leader is there relies on the team leader. It's a team leader meeting, team meeting. encourage people to solve their problems together to collaborate together to deal with their conflict together, you are there to provide a light touch to bring information from outside to the team and to resolve the most tricky conflicts. Everything else, the team will take care of itself. Four essentials of good team leadership, the individual, the plan, the team and the communication.
They're all pretty simple. But simple isn't easy, maintaining high levels of good quality attention to those poor essentials. During the hubbub and Panic of project deadlines and setbacks of risks is difficult. But a relentless focus on these four things will reward you with a first class committed to That is what you want that B team to you