Team Management and Leadership

Managers or leaders? Which is likely to be the most successful attribute in a leading a business team to success? The answer, is that people leading teams need to be both managers and leaders in order to achieve consistent success with happy teams.

A team with a great leader, but who possesses no management skills, is likely to be more successful than one headed by an individual who has neither leadership nor management skills. Leaders are able to communicate a vision, motivate their teams, and inspire confidence. Following a good leader is likely to be a colourful experience, with a high level of engagement and motivation.

However, without the management skills of good planning, setting of clear objectives, direction on how to make the leader's vision a reality, and measurement of progress towards reaching objectives, it is unlikely that the team will fulfil its full potential of success in business.

Management skills are easily identifiable. Planning, communication, setting objectives, setting standards and regularly monitoring performance amongst many others. Management skills are also now under-rated in many organisations since they are traditionally associated with high levels of internal process, at the expense of individual flair and focus on business performance. However, a lack of basic management skills leads to teams which are 'leaky buckets' in terms of performance, tasks which fall between cracks in team roles, and a general feeling of wooliness about what is required of individual team members, and how they go about achieving it.

Leadership skills are more often regarded as being innate, and many companies spend millions of pounds on 'leadership skills' believing them to be a better predictor of success than management skills. A very efficient manager who fails to show leadership behaviour, either ends up with a lacklustre team, or one which suffers from internal conflict to the detriment of performance.