5 Ways to Become a Better Leader and Strengthen Your Team

The strength and success of a team derive from effective leadership. Leadership isn’t just defined as the act of leading, it’s far more dependent on the involvement and the relationships you have within your team. To be an effective leader, you must first have self-awareness, a desire to empower and grow the people around you, a clear understanding of expectations, and accountability from both parties. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams

Here are some helpful steps to improve yourself as a leader and to set your team up for success

1. Self-Awareness: A key element to becoming a better leader is understanding who you currently are as a leader. Take a good look at yourself. What is your leadership style? What is your communication style? Your ability to deal with stress? How in tune are you with your emotions, and how do you react? At this level of your career, you should be reasonably familiar with your strengths and weaknesses; however, are you the kind of leader you would desire for yourself? An excellent way to learn more about who you are as a leader is to ask others for constructive feedback, thus allowing you to assess yourself through a different lens. Once you have input from team members and peers, there are many resources available to improve your weaker areas. Here are ten questions to get a jumpstart on self-reflection.

2. An Internal Desire of Success for Others: It isn’t feasible for a team to reach its highest capabilities when its leader is solely focused on her/his own success. If you genuinely want your team to surpass expectations, you need to acknowledge their work efforts, showcase individual wins, attribute big wins as a team effort, and support individuals in reaching their career goals. Think of your own desire for growth and improvement; they want that as well. This can be done by scheduling time for learning sessions, team-building exercises and activities, performance reviews, and providing the tools and resources needed to streamline work efforts and successfully reach goals.

3. Relationship and Trust Building: We see it happen far too often; the wrong person wiggles their way into a leadership role. In the end, the hiring organization is left with a broken team, no direction, a lot of wasted resources, and fractured relationships that need rebuilding. It is imperative to the success and morale of a team that the hiring organization either promote a trusted party within who has the respect of their peers and relationship-building skills needed or recruit a candidate with a proven record of relational skills, a track record of successes in a leadership role/s, and several professional referral sources to back those claims. As a leader, whether new to the organization or not, you need camaraderie within your team, and you can do that through investing in their thoughts, skillsets, hopes, and dreams.

4. Servant Leadership: Being a servant leader is the easiest road to building trust and relationships and pathing the way for success. Servant leadership opens up a lot of doors for growth and team bonding. In intense situations, it provides others with a sense of ease and the confidence they need to confide in you. It also opens people up to learn more about one another. Putting your team members’ needs first by existing to serve them, rather than them existing to serve you, creates endless opportunities for development and higher performance.

Simple ways to serve your team are: listening intently, putting your words into action, showing empathy, having self-awareness, providing a healthy environment, asking persuasively rather than demanding, taking accountability for your team, strategic planning for team initiatives, using foresight and intuition for the betterment of the group, committing to their growth, and building camaraderie between internal departments.

5. Clear Expectations and Accountability: It’s critical to set clear expectations for your employees to meet their role’s proper requirements. There should be clarity around what is expected from the team as a whole, from each individual member, and what the team can expect from you as a leader. Team members should individually be held accountable for their specific parts of a project so the brunt of the workload doesn’t fall on any one person and so deadlines and goals are met.

Expectations should include work habits, anything that can be measured in future performance reviews, time management, project management, attendance, work policy, accountability, integrity, and more. Setting clear expectations provides context and intention so that everyone is rowing in the same direction. Communication is essential in delivering a clear message and should be done both verbally and written.

Effective leadership doesn’t just happen overnight, and it’s something you should practice at every level of leadership along your journey. You must first set out to be a better you, professionally and personally. Evaluate yourself, your relational skills, and practice the five ways to becoming a better leader. You may find in doing that, your personal relationships improve as well. Many of the practices in becoming a better leader help one gain a multi-level understanding of human characteristics, a renewed focus on how we treat others, and find more important aspects about them, helping create deeper relational connections.