The role of a team leader changes over time. Beyond accompanying, teaching, monitoring, and directing the group to facilitate its functioning, the leader must also engage with all parts of the organization. A leader working within a team must be fully aware that they are a member of that team, a collaborative contributor, and that their success derives from their interdependence with the group.
Successful leaders know they cannot win without the contributions of every team member. They understand they do not have all the answers, and so they do not insist on providing them. The true team leader knows they are part of the team, contributes their own share, executes tasks whenever necessary, and not merely by guiding and directing. Even so, they must always set an example and seek feedback from everyone on their work.
Ten Principles for Leading Groups
According to Italian sociologist Domenico de Masi, a leader who wants to guide a group well must attend to several aspects:
1. Earn sustained trust. Ensure that people follow them consistently, even in moments of discouragement, trusting their guidance with confidence and without needing constant rational explanation.
2. Make the goal compelling. Act in a way that the shared goal becomes fascinating for colleagues, shining like a dream yet attainable as a concrete reality.
3. Engage emotionally. Involve people emotionally, even to the point of enthusiasm, not only about the proposed objective, but also about the timelines and methods anticipated.
4. Bring out each person's best. Draw the best from each individual, inspiring in them a passion for the organization.
5. Transform tensions into solidarity. Convert emerging conflicts into cooperative incentives, turning constraints into opportunities, and the scarcity of resources into acceptance of the challenge and willingness to sacrifice.
6. Balance autonomy and structure. Keep each group member in balance between individual autonomy and integral organization, ensuring that indispensable norms never degenerate into senseless procedures.
7. Balance speaking and listening. Know how to balance the art of speaking with the art of listening, leaving members with the sense and certainty that what has been created belongs not to one person alone, but to the entire group.
8. Make work creative. Have the capacity to transform work into creative leisure, that is, into a dynamic blend of work, study, and play.
9. Let go of the obsolete without guilt. Be able to discard everything that is outdated without generating feelings of guilt or emptiness.
10. Inspire without creating dependency. Be capable of inspiring, suggesting, organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing, changing enough to surprise but not so much as to disorient, in a blend of shrewdness and openness. Know how to attract and involve, and also how to step back and disappear, without the group falling apart under the weight of grief or a sense of powerlessness.
The Challenge of Interdependence
Leaders must contribute their own ideas, help members identify alternatives, guide discussions, and encourage performance feedback. No team, however strong, is free from problems. The leader must encourage the group to continually overcome whatever obstacles appear on the path, enabling the team to recover its confidence and spirit of success.
Group leadership is best carried out when the leader succeeds in making the team aware of how deeply everyone is involved in a relationship of interdependence, affecting each other at every level. That task is demanding and requires tremendous awareness, responsibility, firmness, and determination, both in leading oneself and in leading others.