Facts make leadership!

Facts make leadership!

Team leadership include, among other characteristics, the ability to lead and coordinate the activities of a team, to evaluate its performance, to assign tasks, to create those conditions for developing the knowledge and skills of teammates, to motivate and to plan and organize their activities, to create a positive climate and stimulate a sense of cohesion. By the way … it doesn’t mean that only one person has to do it …

Let’s not bother trying to understand whether leadership is an innate element or not, or how it can be learned, or if it can be developed and all such kind of stuff. Lots of beautiful and competent words have been written around these issues.

With Paolo Chinetti we focused, on the other hand, on the role of team leadership and on how we saw it coming in our working experiences: leadership is truly activated by events!

The research activity of the Center for Creative Leadership, one of the reference points of team science, has been oriented towards seeing and defining leadership as the ability to react to emerging processes. The team adapts, and in doing so, team members act and shape patterns of behavior that we call leadership.

Under this point of view, it is the idea of the team as an evolving social (eco) system that leads us to the concept of leadership as a dynamic process of adaptation. The leader, or leaders, are those who remain able to recognize the change and are able to impress the conditions for achieving a shift that brings the system back into equilibrium while achieving the goal. In this sense, leadership, seen as a dynamic process, is not a ‘static’ characteristic, nor a destination: it is an evolving process that feeds on the experiences and continuous availability of the leader (or leaders) to learn.

We like this definition of leadership which requires the continuous adaptation of our behavior towards the needs of the project and the task. And in order to succeed in doing so, you need that bit of ‘psychological agility’ and that precious ability to communicate so effectively as to involve all team members, in all their diversity, in the turns necessary to adapt to the task’s feedback loops.

The ability to create alignment is a key requirement of this functional and situational leadership. And it never ends: just as the team goes through different stages of evolution, so the leadership shapes its states and responds to the needs of the project.

The two key points of this dynamic leadership model are:

• The focus on the operational cycles of the task delivery and
• The development, by the team, of the skills necessary to manage them.

An important note! The task delivery cycles must be continuously traced back to the objectives through frequent moments of goal setting, monitoring and corrective action, diagnosis and feedback: this way, the leadership is able to guide the team towards the completion of the tasks with the necessary skill and the cognitive, motivational, emotional and behavioral approach that contributes to the effectiveness of team work.

Seize your leadership opportunity!

Team leadership include, among other characteristics, the ability to lead and coordinate the activities of a team, to evaluate its performance, to assign tasks, to create those conditions for developing the knowledge and skills of teammates, to motivate and to plan and organize their activities, to create a positive climate and stimulate a sense of cohesion. By the way … it doesn’t mean that only one person has to do it …

Let’s not bother trying to understand whether leadership is an innate element or not, or how it can be learned, or if it can be developed and all such kind of stuff. Lots of beautiful and competent words have been written around these issues.

With Paolo Chinetti we focused, on the other hand, on the role of team leadership and on how we saw it coming in our working experiences: leadership is truly activated by events!

The research activity of the Center for Creative Leadership, one of the reference points of team science, has been oriented towards seeing and defining leadership as the ability to react to emerging processes. The team adapts, and in doing so, team members act and shape patterns of behavior that we call leadership.

Under this point of view, it is the idea of the team as an evolving social (eco) system that leads us to the concept of leadership as a dynamic process of adaptation. The leader, or leaders, are those who remain able to recognize the change and are able to impress the conditions for achieving a shift that brings the system back into equilibrium while achieving the goal. In this sense, leadership, seen as a dynamic process, is not a ‘static’ characteristic, nor a destination: it is an evolving process that feeds on the experiences and continuous availability of the leader (or leaders) to learn.

We like this definition of leadership which requires the continuous adaptation of our behavior towards the needs of the project and the task. And in order to succeed in doing so, you need that bit of ‘psychological agility’ and that precious ability to communicate so effectively as to involve all team members, in all their diversity, in the turns necessary to adapt to the task’s feedback loops.

The ability to create alignment is a key requirement of this functional and situational leadership. And it never ends: just as the team goes through different stages of evolution, so the leadership shapes its states and responds to the needs of the project.

The two key points of this dynamic leadership model are:

• the focus on the operational cycles of the task delivery and
• the development, by the team, of the skills necessary to manage them.

An important note! The task delivery cycles must be continuously traced back to the objectives through frequent moments of goal setting, monitoring and corrective action, diagnosis and feedback: this way, the leadership is able to guide the team towards the completion of the tasks with the necessary skill and the cognitive, motivational, emotional and behavioral approach that contributes to the effectiveness of team work.

Seize your leadership opportunity!