Research clearly shows that there is a direct correlation between the capabilities of the leader and the performance of their team. In fact, you can attribute 80% of the performance of the team directly to the capabilities of the team leader. Further, the research shows that a great team leader will inspire their team to perform up to 204% higher than a team lead by a less capable leader.

The progress into a leadership role is often recognition of high performance, with the expectation that you can learn the competencies required to lead people and to develop a high performance team “on the job”, in many cases this is not realistic.

The level of support provided by organisations to help newly promoted employees transition from individual contributor into a people leader role is inadequate and, as a result, we see poor employee engagement, high employee turnover and teams performing well below their potential.

From Ian Pratt’s experience, with the right targeted coaching and mentoring it takes an average of six weeks for a team leader to develop the skills required to lead a high performance team. In most cases, the team will improve performance by greater than 80% over this six-week period.

How can a leader learn to be a high performance leader in such a short period?

The skills required to lead a high performance team are skills that most people already have, the art of leading for high performance is how you prioritise and apply these skills.

Now let’s take a look at Supervision and Team Leadership

• Definitions: Team Leader & Supervision
• Good verse poor supervision
• The nine must have Team Leader capabilities
• The various roles of a Team Leader
• Team Motivation - Building a high performance team
• Team Communication
• Team Meetings
• Having Fun at Work

See also Leadership Articles

Whilst the terms supervision and team leadership are sometimes seen as interchangeable, there are subtle differences between the two terms. Traditionally supervision is focused on directing people to get work done where team leadership is focused on developing an environment where people are motivated to do the work.

Here are definitions for each term

Supervision is an act or instance of directing, managing, or oversight.

A team leader is someone who provides guidance, instruction, direction and leadership to a group of other individuals (the team) to achieve a key result or group of aligned results.

A good team leader will provide a positive friendly environment that strengthens their people’s self-esteem. The positive effects of the good leadership on the employee will permeate every aspect of the employee’s life. In return, the employees will give more of themselves, they will choose to work harder and go the extra mile for the organisation.

Whereas a poor leader creates an environment, where they harm their people’s self-esteem, where self-doubt creeps in and the employees stress increases. These negative feelings permeate all aspects of the employee’s life. The employees switch to survival mode and their performance is about half that of their potential performance.

Team leaders have high levels of influence over their employee’s overall quality of life. With this in mind, all leaders should feel obliged to ensure that the employees experience is a positive one.

One On One Feedback

Different organisations, even different departments within the same organisation, vary in how they define the role of their team leaders. This difference in role comes about for two reasons, firstly the organisation needs vary and, secondly the work preferences of the team leader may shape the role in a different direction to the original intention.

When it comes to the understanding the role of a team leader, you will quickly find that you cannot rely on a job title alone. Job titles such as “supervisor” or “team Leader” are broad job titles that can be used to describe a wide range of different positions.

So, let’s start by identifying the three common types of team leader roles, (we have assigned names to these three roles for the purpose of clarity)

1. Team Coach
2. Supervision
3. Team Leader

Building a High Performance Team

One of the primary roles of any team leader or supervisor is to create an environment where employee motivation will flourish. Effectively employee motivation, morale and engagement are all measures of the quality of your people leadership capabilities.

You will find that your people are motivated by what you do, not what you say. Research as clearly identified strong relationship between your leadership behaviour (the things you do with your time at work) and the performance of your employees.

Leaders are all time poor, making it important to focus on doing the things that have the greatest impact on employee motivation.

There is a lot of information around on how to motivate your employees, to save you time we have collated the eight things that you need to do and do well if you wish to improve the motivation of your employees. However, there is no quick fix, motivating your employee will take effort.

When Ian Pratt coach’s leaders to embrace theses eight drivers of motivation the coaches teams tend to improve performance by a 80-220% and he has coached leaders in manufacturing, services, large corporates and small businesses.

The top eight drivers of employee motivation are

1. Receiving frequent informal positive feedback
2. Their manager demonstrates that they are knowledgeable about the employees recent performance
3. Having an opportunity to work on the things you do best
4. Receiving regular formal performance feedback
5. Receiving feedback that helps to develop your capabilities
6. Having the ability to do their job without fear
7. Being clear about expectations
8. Having far more communication than is required to do the job

Find out how you too can make a significant difference to your team's motivation in just a few weeks, using our proven, easy to learn techniques

For High Employee Engagement

When communication is not effective people wind up doing less than they are capable of, distrust creeps and people fill the communication void with gossip, which tends to be negative and inaccurate.

Effective communication provides the context for decision-making empowering employees to get on with their job and provides an understanding of what needs to be done enabling employees to just get on with it.

Discover everything you need to know about team communication

Meetings are an effective way to bring people together to increase communication effectiveness, collaboration and to achieve results.

Meetings result in far more effective communication than either email or teleconferences. This is true because 55% of the meaning and feeling associated with a message is delivered through facial expression and non-verbal signals.

Email is effective in communicating only 7% of the true meaning and feeling of a message and teleconferences communicate only 38%. Discover Effective Team Meetings

Great Supervision: Work is definitely better if you allow your people to have some fun;

• Let your team pick a fun team name
• Have a team member of the month
• Celebrate birthdays
• Celebrate years of service
• Ask quiz questions in your meetings (Goggle quiz questions)
• Create a crossword or a puzzle (It’s easy to do and only takes a few minutes)

Discover how easy it is to create a fun workplace