7 Responsibilities of a Team Leader

A leader in any given context is someone who makes a judgment, takes a decision, and initiates action. He just not believe in accepting what is, but rather, creating what should be. Team leaders by their action inspire others to engage.

With regard to the leadership role per se, the titled leader has seven essential responsibilities.

Envisioning – Establishing Vision and Position:

Envisioning is creating, establishing and communicating a clear, concise, and compelling vision of what value the organization provides to its customers and to its other stakeholders. It delineates the organizations position, or intended position, in the market. It is not about what the company makes or the service it provides, but to frame their vision and position in terms of the needs that will be fulfilled.

Strategizing – Establishing mission and strategic plans:

Every facet of the organization needs to be planned. From production to marketing, finance, logistics, human resources and R & D. The best planners understand that no plan survives contact with reality for long. So good plans have dynamic revision protocols built in.

Delegation – Assigning roles and responsibilities:

Delegation means to give another person a task, duty, or activity while retaining responsibility for the outcome. That latter is key. When a task is delegated, the team leaders gives away a part of his own responsibilities, but, he still owns the outcome and are therefore still vested in the activity. He should ensure assignee is aware that they should ask for help and support if needed, and provide time and channels for them to do so.

Threat Detection – Internal and External Threats:

Scanning the threats is one of the important tasks to be done by the team leader. The team leader needs to know what’s going on to have a clear sight at the front-lines, as it were.

Externally, it means knowing the organization’s customers from every conceivable angle. It is all about having a feel for existing and potential markets, knowing the competitors, staying in touch with industrial trends and monitoring the environment in general, for broader opportunities and threats.

Internally, it deals with the strengths to be leveraged and weaknesses to be negated. This means monitoring performance, for which the two key indicators are quality and efficiency. It ensures the integrity of the organization and all its members.

Networking – Broadening and strengthening resources:

Networking at the highest level is important in providing a fresh current of resource inputs for the organization. Be it talent, ideas, material inputs, customers, information or markets. Networking is not just for, actually, not even primarily for making sales. It’s all about making the world realize your existence. If you have an online presence, you probably have a plan for building your online network. But think do you have the same for building your “live” network?

Codification – Establishing and demonstrating the ethical framework:

Codifying is to establish the ethical framework by which the organization and all of its members operate. The team leader sets the moral tone. These essential responsibilities are prerequisite for organizational success, but they don’t guarantee it. Success is never guaranteed. Mistakes of judgment can still be made, and luck, good and bad sometimes come into play. But in any situation maintaining a positive environment and

Motivation- Leading by example:

Albert Schweitzer once wrote, “You must teach men at the school of example, for they will learn at no other”. You do not raise morale in an organization; it always filters down from the top. There are no bad soldiers under a good general. A single change in a behavioral characteristic of a key executive can cause a positive multiplier effect that impacts the behavior of an enormous number of people.

The best leaders possess a charisma that gets others excited about joining the group and working toward the same goal together. They make their team members feel good about their role in the team and the work that they contribute. They give others the feeling that everyone is working together, and not working under or for someone else. They have the ability to inspire their team members to want to help the team and put their all into their efforts. J.Q.Adams once said “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader”