Five Functions of a Team Leader

In the early years of business, a team leader’s function was much less complex. He or she was primarily regarded as an overseer both by employees and by management. The job was quite simple then: carry out orders from above and if the people below don’t produce, fire them. In today’s ever changing business environment, most of that has changed, and changed for the better. The traditional autocratic boss is no longer effective. Employees today have different needs, work for different reasons, and are more educated and aware than ever before. Today’s team leader is looked up as a coach, motivator, mentor, staff development specialist, and person who can be trusted to get results. 

Competition, technology, and economic conditions have forced companies and organizations to realize that their most valuable resource is, in fact, their people. Today’s team leader needs the skills, adaptability, and the flexibility to achieve the results in this fast moving, global marketplace. Today’s team leader must now think in terms of effectiveness, excellence, accelerated results, return on investment, and profitability.

As a team leader, one of your primary roles is developing the resources, specifically, the human resources of your department, business unit, or team. The tasks of a team leader are classically defined as those of planning, organizing, staffing, motivating, achieving, and evaluating results. Let’s take a look at these five functions in a little more detail.

Planning
Planning involves establishing and planning the goals of your department, business unit, or team. These goals must be aligned with the overall organizational goals, the goals of your boss, and the individual goals of you and your team in order to achieve the best results. It is proven that if a team, business unit, or departmental goals conflict with overall organizational goals, or if individual’s goals conflict with either, the organization and the individual will not be as productive.

Organizing
Organizing involves making sure that all of the necessary processes are in place. These processes should include, or be connected to, providing service that exceeds customer expectations or to produce the products your customer requires. Organizing could involve providing customer support or technical assistance, scheduling machine time and ordering raw materials, assigning priorities and routing workflow, as well as developing new products and services. Once your goals are established and action plans are developed, it is your responsibility to organize your efforts and energies and those of your team.

Staffing
Staffing involves choosing, selecting, or involving the right and best team members. This may occur at the point of employment where you are called upon to interview applicants and select those you would like to hire. It also occurs daily as you are involved with staffing assignments and responsibilities in accordance with your team’s, department’s, or business unit’s objectives. As you lead and guide your group on a daily basis, you are constantly involved in making decisions about who should be assigned to do a particular job or project, who should be scheduled for a particular kind of training, or how many new people you might need in the future.

Motivating or Directing
Motivating or directing may be your most important function. Remember, your role has a lot to do with getting results through others. Ultimately, every team leader is judged by the results of his or her team, department, or business unit. All of the sophisticated planning, organizing, and staffing will be of little use unless you can create an environment where your team is motivated to generate the required outcomes. Remember that once your goals and action plans are established, you must elicit the commitment and cooperation of your team members by establishing and maintaining a motivating environment.

Evaluation
As a team leader you are responsible for evaluating what goes on in your team, department, or business unit and the results generated. You are constantly observing how the team is proceeding to the desired outcomes. You are responsible, when things are not running well, to take corrective action. Proactive evaluation of results and outcomes involve constant monitoring and measuring of processes, resources, and team members to ensure all activities and plans are yielding the results that you are responsible for and the organization expects.

If you look at these five functions carefully – planning, organizing, staffing, motivating, and evaluation – you’ll see that they really operate as a continuous cycle that is never-ending. Goals are established and action plans are developed to achieve specific and desired results. In order to carry out the specific action plans, team members are selected, materials and machines to be used are identified, the amount of time to complete, and these types of things are organized. While the actual work is going on, you lead and organize as well as direct and motivate. As the work is progressing, you manage the results by measuring and evaluating. When the results are not satisfactory, you analyze the reasons, make plans to deal with the root cause, and then organize, staff, direct, and measure the effectiveness of the new plan which perpetuates the continuous cycle.

Lean Quote: Simplicity is the Key to Brilliance

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Simplicity is the key to brilliance." — Bruce Lee

Simplicity is the key to effective continuous improvement.Simplicity is the state or quality of being simple. Simplicity is not simple. If it were otherwise, it would not be the subject of discussion. Simplicity would be what is taken for granted.

According to Occam's razor, all other things being equal, the simplest theory is the most likely to be true.  A simple solution always takes less time to finish than a complex one.  So always do the simplest thing that could possibly work next. If you find something that is complex replace it with something simple. It's always faster and cheaper to replace complexity now, before you waste a lot more time on it.

In my experience with problem solving in a Lean environment it is often those simple creative solutions at the source of the problem by those who do the work that are the most effective.  Lean leaders understand this well and work to create a culture that fosters and develops the use of this ingenuity.

If your process isn’t simple, it’s going to be very expensive, not very usable, and probably not sustainable – put simply, it will fail. Whether evaluating new processes, or determining which ones to re-engineer or discard, make simplicity a key consideration. Remember this – usability drives adoptability, and simplicity is the main determinant of usability.

 

Lean Tips Edition #105 (1576-1590)

For my Facebook fans you already know about this great feature. But for those of you that are not connected to A Lean Journey on Facebook or Twitter I post daily a feature I call Lean Tips.  It is meant to be advice, things I learned from experience, and some knowledge tidbits about Lean to help you along your journey.  Another great reason to like A Lean Journey on Facebook.

Click this link for A Lean Journey's Facebook Page Notes Feed.

Here is the next addition of tips from the Facebook page:

Lean Tip #1576 - Get the Whole Team on Board

To get the greatest advantages out of Lean, the entire organization should adopt and promote its practices, and extend its influence to suppliers as well. You must involve the people who are the closest to the work and you must get support from senior management as well.

Lean Tip #1577 - Ask Other People for New Ideas

It is really important for ideas to constantly be discussed, some of these ideas might pop in the minds of someone but due to lack of communication it might get lost. It is really important to keep asking the team and the people involved in the Kaizen process their ideas and this can actually create a train of thought that will help the team have fresh ideas most of the time. When evaluating your process you should take this into account by asking the team about when was the last time this occurred.

Lean Tip #1578 - Do Not Stick to a Specific Kaizen Procedure

In Kaizen it is really important to keep everything fresh and updated, some ideas might have seen useful or bright before but it is important to be able to reevaluate them. Just like some martial arts, Kaizen is something to learn from others but when you reach certain level of mastery you become able to modify and use this knowledge in different ways. This gives Kaizen the ability to evolve to different times, if you stay with the same kind of Kaizen for a long time it is possible that many things that applied when it was first implemented might not work correctly now and will probably need some tweaking.

Lean Tip #1579 - Record and Analyze the Kaizen Process

It is really important to measure and analyze how the process is going. Measuring will allow to have a clear idea of how the process is working and what flaws the process might have, this will make it easier to tackle this specific aspects of the Kaizen process. Also, if the measurements are positive, it will also show how close the company is to the desired level of quality and this will encourage everyone involved in the process. Doing this will also show exactly what we are trying to avoid, the process getting stuck, keeping this measurement will show when the process might start waning or starts getting weaker and will help the team plan a way of restoring the strength to the project.

Lean Tip #1580 - Make Sure You Have a Continuous Improvement Leader

It is really important to have someone leading the improvement, this leader or group of people should be constantly analyzing and helping to push forward the Kaizen operation. Sometimes Kaizen might get stuck and this is the moment when these leaders should act, making the necessary modification to keep it going strong. These leaders should be ready to push Kaizen when it is necessary, so it never stops, and this means they need to have knowledge of how Kaizen works and they need to be optimistic and enthused about Kaizen. Having the proper leaders will make sure the process advance properly, making sure it doesn’t lose its momentum.

Lean Tip #1581 - Be Realistic and Review Your Plan

Step one is to create a realistic plan that you can immediately implement. Step two is to review your plan every three months. Don’t be afraid to adjust it. Although it’s important to create a business growth plan and stay on course if you’re seeing positive return, it is just as crucial to have the confidence and ability to quickly analyze data and know how deviate from the plan if it’s not working.

Lean Tip #1582 - Form a New Habit to Improve Your Business

Force yourself to do it for two to three weeks and it will start to become a habit. Habits don’t happen overnight. Studies show that a habit takes 20-30 consecutive days. Make certain parts of your businesses growth habit and it’ll help your business unlike anything you’ve tried in the past.

Lean Tip #1583 - Learn Something New In the New Year

As professionals, we often learn what we need to achieve our licenses and stop there. Your field is constantly evolving. Being comfortable with new technology plays a part. Take at least one continuing education course, either in person or online. An additional professional certification is even better.

Lean Tip #1584 - Plan for the Next Day Before Leaving

The details are fresh in your mind before you leave the office. They won’t be after dinner and a good night’s sleep. Write out a short plan and prioritize the next day’s activities.  You can get productive immediately if you arrive at the office knowing exactly what you want to accomplish that day. There will be interruptions, but you have a fighting chance.

Lean Tip #1585 - Expect the Obstacles to Be Successful at Your Goal.

Most people run into a challenge or obstacle and seek immediate escape. Have a plan to push forward when this happens. If you’re not ready to suffer during adversity, you’re not going to be successful. You need to know going in that making a change is going to be hard work, not a walk in the park.

Lean Tip #1586 - Conduct Daily Gemba Walks

Each department should post their goals and objectives. During daily gemba walks executives can then ask a department head or manager what resources they may need. This is not a time for in-depth examination; the action should provide guidance to department heads for respective goals, demonstrate a commitment from the executive to supporting those goals, and be a mechanism for monitoring progress.

Lean Tip #1587 – Share Information and Numbers With Your Employees

Let them in on what is going on within the company as well as how their jobs contribute to the big picture. When you keep you employees informed they tend to feel a greater sense of worth. Keep communication hopeful and truthful – do not be afraid to share bad news, instead be more strategic about how you deliver it. Improve performance through transparency – By sharing numbers with employees, you can increase employees’ sense of ownership.

Lean Tip #1588 – Collaborate and Share on Problem-Solving

When employees get the idea that their manager or leader is the one who has to solve all the problems, it takes away from their sense of empowerment, and ultimately is likely to decrease engagement over time. Encourage team members to take responsibility, and work through problems or issues on their own, or collaboratively. It’s not the manager’s job to fix everyone else’s problems.

Lean Tip #1589 – Provide Constant Feedback on the Positives

When people know what they’re doing well, they’ll keep doing it – or, even better, do more of it. Providing someone with a little recognition on what they’re doing well can go a long way toward boosting morale. This is not to say “ignore the weaknesses” – just don’t make the weaknesses the only focus area of feedback. This doesn’t mean you should not create accountability, it actually means the opposite – but, if all you do is criticize, people will learn how to hide their mistakes or shift blame.

Lean Tip #1590 – Encourage Open Communication

You can get insight into what things are important to the employee by using surveys, suggestion boxes and team meetings. Be open-minded and encourage them to express their ideas and perspectives without criticism. This means putting into practice everything you have learned about effective listening. Address their concerns in the best way you can.

Lean Quote: Chaotic Action is Preferable to Orderly Inaction

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Chaotic Action is Preferable to Orderly Inaction." — Karl E. Weick

For leaders, action is one of the most important traits they can embody.  Taking action means getting things done.  It means seizing the initiative.  It conveys momentum, and energy, and creating something new, something that didn’t exist before.  And this excites followers and others who understand that going towards something is always better than sitting around staring at the wall.

Often managers spot a chance to do something valuable for their company, but for some reason, they cannot get started. Even if they begin the project, they give up when they see the first big hurdle. The inability to take purposeful action seems to be pervasive across companies. Managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with crucial issues which require reflection, systematic planning, creative thinking, and above all, time.

If you do nothing, nothing changes. Things at rest have a tendency to remain at rest. Be aware of items that stall your action. It's better to have a 50-percent improvement right away than it is to take no action and hope for a 100-percent improvement sometime in the future.

The only cure for inaction is action. That’s why the first step in creating a successful culture of execution is creating a bias toward action. People who make things happen need to be praised and rewarded. People who don’t should be coached to change, or weeded out. Failure cannot be unduly punished. Unless people feel free to make mistakes, they will not feel free to take bold actions.

Action hurts now. We’ll get scarred. We’ll be uncomfortable. We’ll take losses. But we’ll grow. Inaction doesn’t hurt now, but it hurts for the rest of our lives. We’ll be comfortable now and be unable to do the uncomfortable thing later. We’ll be made soft by our stagnation. Every day we choose inaction over action it makes it harder to take action. We weaken ourselves. Every time we take action we become stronger.

 

True Leadership Ability Goes Beyond Managing and Supervising

In today’s global business environment, the best laid plans, the greatest technology, and the best equipment will produce average results unless they are organized and utilized by a skilled and proficient leader. You must be able to inspire people to follow your lead. No matter how technically capable you are, you won’t be effective as a leader unless you gain the willing cooperation of others. You are the team’s coach, captain, quarterback, cheerleader, and fan all rolled into one. You are the critical lynch pin between the organization’s goals and your team. Your success in leading your department, team, or business unit to greater results and profitability lies in your true leadership ability.

It wasn’t always this way. An American mechanical engineer, Frederick W. Taylor (1856 – 1915) who sought to improve industrial efficiency, created a set of principles which came to be called Scientific Management. The basic assumption was a supervisor of the past could derive maximum productivity from workers by scientifically breaking down the required production tasks into the smallest possible units, and then assigning each worker a definite task with a definite time allocation and a definite manner for getting the task done. Other industrial engineers soon added to the basic principles of Scientific Management with a host of techniques and practices: written instruction cards for each task, sophisticated scheduling systems, job descriptions, and a lot of time and motions studies. None of these practices were inherently bad.

In fact, if you study modern supervisory texts, you’ll find that some of the same techniques that came out of Scientific Management are still advocated as being essential for good management. But, by the mid 1930’s, the basic premise of Scientific Management was in question. It was a good system, in theory, that had never been able to deliver the results it so thoroughly sought. Why not? Scientific Management was an attempt to engineer human activity without reasonable consideration for the human element. It was an attempt to engineer activity in much the same way someone would program a computer. By the mid 1930’s, theorists from the human relations movement began to show that motivated workers delivered better results.

These studies, and countless others, have all yielded a common truth: the best systems and procedures will produce limited results unless they are administered with full recognition of the fact that the team members who are to implement the systems and procedures are human, and need to be managed, motivated, and guided by an effective leader.

As a team leader you must do much more than manage and supervise. You must gain the trust and willing cooperation of those who look to you for leadership. You must learn to use all of your strengths by recognizing, developing, and utilizing the talents of your team. Because of the function and role of a team leader, it’s obvious that good team leaders are critically important to the success of an organization.

Studies at Stanford Research Institute, Harvard University, and the Carnegie Foundation have proven that 85% of the reason you get a job, keep a job, and move ahead in that job has more to do with people skills and people development. Remember, a team leader is responsible for: planning, organizing, staffing, motivating, and evaluating results. Most importantly, they need to exhibit an intangible collection of skills and abilities we commonly identify as leadership. A team leader has to be able to get results through his or her team!

The Real Reason We Procrastinate

Self-motivation is essential for success. When self-motivation does not push us toward accomplishment, outside influences have a tendency to pull us toward mediocrity. Procrastination is consistently failing to pursue the goals you have set in a timely manner, which leads to deflated self-motivation. Why do we procrastinate? Why do we unnecessarily put off something that we have decided in advance is important?

On reason is laziness. Sometimes we don’t do things we know we should so because we simply don’t like doing them. Maybe they’re unpleasant or take more effort than we care to expend. If you fall into this trap, use your goals to focus and remind yourself of the rewards you anticipate receiving by achieving your goals, as well as the potential consequences of not achieving your goals. When you’re pursuing goals you believe in, you’ll be too excited and motivated to be lazy.

Another cause of procrastination is apathy. If you catch yourself procrastinating, ask yourself whether you truly desire to achieve the goal in question. Maybe your lack of enthusiasm is telling you that you need to reevaluate your direction.

The largest cause of procrastination is typically fear. Understanding the nature of fear can help you overcome it. If fear of the unknown immobilizes you don’t imitate an ostrich and stick your head in the sand. Use the goal setting process to reduce your fear. Identify all of the obstacles that stand between where you are now and where you want to be. Develop solutions to overcome them. Fears immediately begin to subside when you turn the unknown into knowns.

Fear of failure is another common fear that has a tendency to hold us back. All worthwhile goals pose the risk of failure. Realistically high goals, the only kind that are meaningful and useful, lie somewhere beyond what you know for certain you can accomplish. Failure is a necessary component of progress. If you reach for a worthwhile goal, you might fail. But if you don’t try at all, you have truly failed. It’s virtually impossible to grow and achieve without failing at times along the way. But failure during your journey does not constitute the failure of your journey. Successful people often try, fail, try again, fail again, and try again before they succeed. They view failure as an essential part of the learning process on the path to their ultimate destination.

Adults tend to lose perspective on failure. We forget how many times as children we failed to tie our shoes before we succeeded. We forget how many times we fell before we learned to walk, skate, ski, or ride a bike. When you stop failing, you stop learning. If you struggle with fear of failure, examine the cause. Is there an issue with pride? Are you afraid of what others might think if you fail? Understanding the source of your fear will help you overcome it.

Fear of rejection and fear of criticism detour many from their journeys to success. Rather than face the possible rejection, some people simply don’t ask for what they need. Rather than face possible criticism, they conceal their true abilities and never display their full potential. Every team leader must rely on team members to get something accomplished. In order to attain our dreams and goals, no matter what they invariably ask others for their support, participation, assistance, or commitment. And every time we ask, we face the possibility of reject or criticism.

Lean Quote: Effective Leaders Must Master the Technique of the Educator

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"It has been well said that an effective leader must know the meaning and master the technique of the educator." — Philip Selznick

A leader must be a good teacher. Leaders must be able to be good teachers to share insights and experiences. Leaders can inspire, motivate, and influence subordinates at various levels through the use of teaching ability. Obviously, one must be a good communicator in order to be an effective teacher. Without the ability to clearly and effectively communicate a message, goal, story, or philosophy, it is impossible to lead.

In a Lean organization, learning is critical, and line management's direct responsibility. Lean is based on how people think; simply defined, Lean is shared thinking. Management and employees need common philosophy, ideas, and principles. Leaders can't just put workers into situations, and hope they learn the right things. They should take responsibility for the message, combining real-life experience with direct coaching. An organization's principles should become guideposts to help people make tough decisions.

Lean Leaders must not only be teachers, they must also preach and promote teaching at all levels. Lean Leaders make sure that all of their direct reports are good teachers. In classical leadership, the role of teaching is frequently delegated – not so with the Lean Leaders.

The Lean Leader must teach leadership. This is the real key to sustaining the gains. Teach them to keep a focus, teach them how to get their resources aligned and teach them how not to “de-motivate” their subordinates and peers and you will have gone a long way toward teaching leadership.

To teach, a leader has to learn, and learning Lean is more than a cerebral exercise By applying Lean to everything, a leader becomes a more effective teacher. Remember what leadership is really about: It's not a job; it's an act. Leaders have to learn how to teach, build creative tension, and eliminate fear and comfort. Leaders need to actively participate in the transformation of the business, and apply Lean to their own jobs.