Leadership Development Plan: Building Collaborative Teams

Introduction: Defining Leadership

Warren Bennis describes leadership as the ability to transform and actualize a vision into reality. With the precise balance of effort and application, one can achieve anything desired, and this is what defines true leadership (Bateman & Snell, 2006). A leader is supposed to be a person who inspires, encourages, and empowers others. A leader has the courage to make tough decisions and accept the responsibilities that follow. A leader also has the compassion to listen to and understand his or her followers and coworkers (Gardner & John, 1990). In an effort to build team spirit, a leader must be able to motivate others by transferring positive energy to those under his or her guidance, directing that energy toward shared success.

Goal: Building an Interactive Team

Goal: To build an interactive team with the ability to participate in the day-to-day running of the facility, ensuring that respective duties are undertaken with the requisite efficiency.

I was in a position to build a team from the working staff in the facility. I undertook to call weekly meetings to review the previous week's activities and work. The reviews highlighted the challenges staff faced in the facility and called upon staff members to engage in developing their own solutions. Team members participated freely in the weekly discussions, taking the opportunity to share experiences and ask questions about their working environment. These meeting sessions also encouraged staff to embrace their roles and feel more motivated.

Challenges in Team Development

From these team discussions, it became clear that in-house solutions to working challenges are often better than looking outward for answers. It was appreciated that team members can work cohesively to achieve the best outcomes in a work environment rather than waiting for management or directors to provide direction. When team members are involved in developing their own solutions and discussing their views about work and working conditions, they become motivated to perform. The working environment becomes more positive as a result. Listening to staff as they share freely within their teams allows for mutual interaction and confidence-building that improves overall work performance (Bowmann-Larsen & Wiggen, 2004).

In creating the interactive team, it was difficult at the outset to encourage staff members to participate in sharing their previous experiences. This challenge arose because staff members feared that open sharing would expose their respective weaknesses and compromise their job security. It was also observed that, initially, staff members were more inclined to highlight difficulties they faced with managerial directives rather than reflecting on their own work performance.

Because employees were not accustomed to participating in decision-making or team sharing, they felt this was a foreign culture within their organization. This made it difficult to first bring the team together and subsequently encourage them to take part in discussions. It was also challenging to identify individual weaknesses among employees in their day-to-day work. Since team participation in discussions was voluntary, uncovering those individual gaps proved especially difficult.