How to Become a Good Team Leader

Motivating other team members to commit and engage in collective teamwork is not an easy task. Here are some useful tips to being a good team leader:

Facilitating psychological safety

Leaders play a key role ensuring that all team members feel safe to seek feedback, share information, experiment, ask for help, and talk about errors. Specifically, according to Edmonson (1999), leaders should:

• Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
• Acknowledge your fallibility.
• Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

Developing a shared team mental model

Team effectiveness will improve if there’s a shared understanding of the task, team, equipment, and situation (Kozlowski & Bell, 2012). As a team leader, you should:

• Set up a clear mission and vision for the team.
  • Establish a shared and cooperative team goal. Revisit them as needed.
• Focus on team planning before starting the job task (DeChurch & Haas, 2008).
  • Deliberate planning specifies a primary course of action.
  • Contingency planning specifies backup plans.
  • Reactive planning adapts plans to account for changing task conditions.

Understanding team transactive memory system

Team transactive memory is a team-level shared system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information regarding who knows what in the team. Transactive memory fosters better team performance (Pearsall, Ellis, & Bell, 2010). As a team leader, we recommend that you:

• Encourage communication.
  • Appreciate each other’s expertise and understand from whom you can seek aid when necessary.
• Communicate about roles and responsibilities.
  • This is especially important in the early stages of a team’s development cycle.
• Encourage frequent and periodic face-to-face meetings throughout the project.
  • Virtual teams were found to have a hard time developing team transactive memory systems.

Facilitating effective team coordination and cooperation

To facilitate effective team coordination and cooperation, you are encouraged to:

• Foster a trusting team environment.
  • Begin meetings with ice-breaker questions.
  • Team-building activities.
• Know each team member’s expertise and personality. Invite contributions when necessary.
• Give feedback or rewards when team members contribute their ideas.