4. TEAMWORK AND COMMUNICATION
4.4 Leadership and Communication
Sushil Saini
Fundamental to becoming a strong leader is learning how to be an effective team member. Therefore, all of the teamwork tools and strategies explored in previous sections apply directly to leadership. This includes cultivating empathy, effective communication, self-reflection, and accountability for your choices and actions. As a leader you will model these and lead by example, mainly through how you communicate.
The key difference lies in your perspective.
Shifting to a Leadership Perspective
Moving from being a team member to a team leader requires a shift in your perspective: As leadership expert, Simon Simak puts it in this short video, “the real job of a leader is not about being in charge — it’s about taking care of those in our charge.”
As a team member, you are responsible for the work; as a leader you are responsible for the people doing the work. A leader ensures that all team members have what they need to do their best work and reach their potential. But what does this look like in action, and more specifically, in communication?
In the following 7-minute video, Simon Sinek explains these ideas further, stressing that good leadership requires commitment to ongoing learning:
Essential to showing up as a good leader is committing to continually learning and honing your communication skills. From sharing information and offering opinions to soliciting feedback and actively listening, an effective leader can communicate with people with a wide range of backgrounds, identities, locations, and roles using a variety of tools, all of which require strong writing, speaking, and listening skills. There is no effective leadership without effective communication.
Leaders need to become aware of the scripts that run subconsciously in their mind about what leadership looks like and decide what kind of leader they want to be. Try to bring these to the surface: think consciously for a minute about how you imagine leadership; how do leaders behave and what they do? Consider how well this imaginary leader aligns with what experts tell us about effective leadership traits. Specifically, effective leaders tend to
- Focus on people and behaviour more than on tasks or final products, positively reinforcing the kind of behaviour they want to see continue
- Value their team, invest time and energy in fostering team development and growth, and encourage continuous learning
- Inspire, motivate, and empower everyone on the team to reach their potential
- Maintain two-way communication, actively listening and making sure everyone feels heard by acting on their feedback.
Think about ideas presented in the previous sections of this textbook on Project Management Tools and Teamwork Strategies and Managing Team conflict. Consider how your perspective and communications strategies might shift as you move from a team member role into a leadership role.
Shifting to a Leadership Perspective
Imagine a scenario where your team is using the Feedback Model described in Ex. 4.4 (in the previous section) to reflect on the submission of a major deliverable by sharing their ideas on
- What worked?
- What was tricky?
- What might we do differently?
As a team member, you may speak to the specific tasks you had to complete, how easy or hard it was to do, and perhaps reference tools that were used to complete it (ie: document access, the work plan or schedule, or actions other teammates that impacted your work for better or worse.)
As a team leader, however, you would speak to how the team functioned as a whole. You would speak to the elements that allowed the team members to excel. What did the team do well together? What conditions allowed that synergy to happen? What was tricky in terms of the team’s actions and performance as a whole leading up to submission? And, what could the leader do differently moving forward to create an even better environment for the team to excel?
In this example, we see some key leadership traits: clear communication, self-reflection, accountability, learning agility, vision, and – depending how honest you are – courage.
Developing Leadership Ability
As you hone your teamwork skills, taking the time to explore your relationship to, and understanding of, leadership provides an opportunity to identify and develop the traits that will guide your own development as a leader.
Watch the video below, in which Simon Sinek builds on the perspective shift discussed earlier, and explains why courage, integrity, and communication are the essential leadership traits that support successful teams. All the good intentions of a leader cannot materialize without skilled communication.
The Centre for Creative Leadership expands on this list by identifying 12 essential traits of effective leaders and providing detailed explanations for each one. These are briefly summarized below, but go to the website to review more detailed information and additional resources on each of these leadership traits.
The Centre for Creative Leadership: 12 Characteristics of a Good Leader
- Self-awareness: understand what drives you. What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do others see you?
- Respect: showing you value other’s perspectives and building a culture of belonging
- Compassion: seeking to understand other’s feelings and perspectives and acting on that understanding.
- Vision: not only having a vision, but motivating others to share it and feel meaningfully engaged in achieving the goals.
- Communication: use oral and written communication skills effectively to share information, solicit feedback and input, and actively listen.
- Learning Agility: the ability to “know what to do when you don’t know what to do.” Great leaders are essentially great learners!
- Collaboration: work effectively with a variety of colleagues with different social identities, cultures, experiences, and roles. Embracing the diversity in your team increases innovation and creates a more engaged and empowered team.
- Influence: authentically and transparently persuading and influencing your colleagues requires that you establish a high level of trust.
- Integrity: being consistent, honest, moral and trustworthy.
- Courage: speaking up in challenging situations, whether proposing a new idea, giving feedback, or flagging a concern; good leadership means creating a safe space for your team to have the courage to do the same.
- Gratitude: showing sincere appreciation uplifts the team, can improve their sense of well-being, enhance motivation, and reduce anxiety.
- Resilience: the ability to respond adaptively to challenges and setbacks, while also focussing on the wellbeing of the team
EXERCISE 4.6 – Take a deeper dive
Keeping Simon Sinek’s 3-minute video on leadership traits in mind, select 3 of the 12 Characteristics described by the Centre for Creative Leadership. Go to their website and take a closer look that the information they provide about those 3 traits. For each trait you chose, consider the following questions:
- What is your initial reaction? Does if feel comfortable or uncomfortable to imagine yourself applying this trait as a leader in a teamwork setting?
- Do you agree that this is a trait of good leadership? Why or why not?
- Do you have experience working with a leader who exhibited this characteristic? What did that feel like as a team member?
- How do you think developing this characteristic will serve you in your own leadership journey?
REFLECT: Use this exercise to take notes for yourself. Refer back to them before you take on a leadership role, and revisit them after completing it, to see what you have learned about each.
At some stage in your professional development, you may want to explore various leadership theories and frameworks to find the most effective approach for a given situation. Laura Radtke’s online textbook, Principles of Leadership and Management, is an excellent resource for exploring further, especially the chapter on “Contemporary Approaches to Leadership.”
At this stage, however, take the opportunity to explore, observe, and practice the key skills that will help you become an effective leader. Inventory your strengths and weaknesses among these traits and find opportunities to grow your leadership experience and skills.
EXERCISE 4.7 – Team Reflection on Leadership
The statements below all provide partial answers to the question “What is leadership?” Have each team member choose 1-2 of the statements and consider why you think these statements are true of leadership. Share examples, either hypothetical or from your experience, of what this looks like in practice. Describe concrete ways your team can implement these ideas in your upcoming project.
- Partnership, collaboration, and working well with others are all leadership.
- Reflecting on what you did, how you did it, how it made you feel, and how to improve the same experience in the future is leadership.
- Dealing with adversity is leadership.
- Understanding that failure is normal is leadership.
- Reframing setbacks as opportunities to improve is leadership.
- Being a mentor or coach is leadership.
- Identifying your skillsets and the skillsets of others is leadership.
- Adapting your approach to harness the skillsets of your team is leadership.
- Recognizing passion and proficiency in others is leadership.
- Stepping back so they can lead is leadership.
REFLECT: Good leadership manifests in a variety of ways; broadening your awareness of what leadership entails helps you to develop these capacities. Write an individual reflection on if/how your understanding of leadership has changed and how you will apply this information to future tasks.
