In fact, this is a title that no member of the team should ever hold. If you refer to a member of the team as the "team leader", even temporarily, this person will have more responsibility for results than the rest of the team, although he has no more authority than anyone else on the team. You’ve put this person in an impossible and very frustrating position. The other members of the team will relax and look to the "leader" to make the decisions and take the initiative. Furthermore, whether you mean to or not, by creating the role of "team leader", you are creating another layer of management, another layer through which information is filtered and altered on the way down and on the way up. That’s not good.
Instead, 1) transform your supervisors into coaches who can teach your associates how to think independently, and 2) establish objective measures of performance for small groups of people (3-7 is ideal) so that they have an incentive to work together. Then, teach them how to facilitate their own meetings and come to consensus on how to run their "business".
If you build your teams correctly, you won’t need team leaders. To be sure, a good coach should keep her ear to the ground and provide additional coaching as needed, but if you teach your people how to think and surround them with the right measures, they will figure out how to run their business without another layer of management.
Demarco and Lister, in their book, Peopleware, write, "On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin break down." We couldn't agree more.
© 2002 Everest Consulting Group, Inc. (888)910-8326.
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