How to become a better team leader

If you’re leading a team now, there are things you can do to sharpen your leadership skills.

Building on these skills now will help you at every stage throughout the entirety of your career. You should look now for opportunities to demonstrate to your employer that you have what it takes to be a leader. 

Here are a few ways you can help yourself become a better team leader, no matter the stage of your career. 

Empower your teammates

A good team leader is someone who is a motivator. You want to motivate individuals to do their best work and contribute to the success of the whole team. This is a great way to improve employee morale and create better workplace relationships and better company culture. 

Communicate 

Have you ever found yourself in a position before where you were working on a project that didn’t have a clear set of objectives? This creates a disconnect that leads to complications, and delays that can snowball into resentment and the overall project can suffer. Similarly, if a team leader doesn’t communicate clearly, it can start to splinter relationships at work that affect productivity and the company’s culture. Communication skills are vital to the success of a leader. It’s important in a leadership role that you are open, honest and transparent. 

Lead by example

A good leader will never ask their direct reports for something they would not be willing to do themselves. Leaders can unite their teams around a certain goal. Leaders are not afraid to get their hands dirty. They can dive into a project to offer assistance when needed, but also know when to pull back, delegate, and when to trust team members to handle work on their own. This is a good way to display the attitudes and leadership behaviors you want to see in your team members, too. 

Leadership is a skill. Just like any other skill, you have to practice it to become proficient in it. By putting forth the effort to develop professionally, and then going out of your way to encourage and lift your team members, you can sharpen those skills that will ultimately help you land that top leadership position. We wrote previously about ways you can empower your team from a distance here, and about the differences between leadership and management.