Team Leader Solution

Today, when businessmen & state organizations seek for some administrative conceptions allowing them to reach more efficiency without making expensive investments into new technologies, they aspire to figure out some ways to rebuild internal managerial structure of their enterprises in a better manner. Conception of Team Leadership can be considered as a way to reach excellence through minimal investments. Implementing this approach may include establishing special role in the team or just assigning particular components of leadership to an extended number of people in this workgroup so that everyone can carry out his/her own portion of tasks. The point of using a solution is making employees to be more responsible & interested in undertaking their immediate jobs properly through reducing stress and fear in the collective. Let’s consider some principles of such projects along with some computer-based solutions to support them.

The principles of Team Leader Plan:

While traditional leadership is about maintaining the direct, strict and inflexible top-down hierarchy of seniority where a manager of a higher position has all powers and rights to prevail over managers of the lower levels (and therefore can ignore opinions, visions and needs of subordinated people), the modern ’s resources reside in opposite – they are in a continuous interpersonal help & assistance, in providing friendly guidance and instructions to subordinates rather than giving them some strict directives to obey, making consensual decisions rather than forcing subordinates to accept the manager’s opinion, etc. The main tasks are the following:

• Providing effective supervision, guidance, instructions and direction to all group members;
• While the team leader can be appointed to a formal (nominal) role of the manager of the team, the core of his role is to behave rather as “primus inter pares” (the first among equal), but not to reign over the team;
• Facilitating discussions and conflicts, listening and considering opinions of all group members to integrate them into a consolidated solution;
• Recognizing authority and competence of all team members;
• Promoting interpersonal respect, enthusiasm, creativity, and proper working discipline (working behavior) in the team, along with eliminating fear, stressful factors and favoritism;
• Serving as an example of a professional excellence and proper behavior for the team members;
• When there is no a sole team leader in the team, responsibilities in leadership are allotted among several people, so everyone carries out some part of them in his/her own area;

Example of the Team Leader Solution:

Good example of a program that can help a team leader to undertake his/her functions is VIP Task Manager. This tool is designed to plan, schedule, report and control tasks in the team. It can be used to organize (plan and follow) the process of carrying out the essential tasks while holding them broken down into smaller and more specific tasks to perform everyday. Let’s consider some features of this application:

• Team Leader Projects – once the leader’s major tasks are deliberated on a higher level, they need to be explained in a more detailed way to drive daily work of this person, while helping him/her to avoid activities which reside out of the scope of his/her role. Such a plan can be recorded in VIP Task Manager (Task Tree mode) and shared among several concurrently working persons (if there are more than one team leader in a workgroup);

•  Team Leader Calendar – this is an adjustable view that makes people collaborating at their tasks in terms of time-specified agenda. When the team leader’s workflow is defined, his/her tasks need to be outlined on a task grid to be followed as a clear schedule of actions (timeline). With a help of VIP Task Manager the project team can plan, study and report their tasks to perform and report;

• Team Leader Report – this is a tool to gather data on what tasks and how well were completed, what results were reached and if something needs special attention from the side of the team leader to be resolved or additionally guided. VIP Task Manager is a program that provides the following tools to cope with this:
  • Team Leader Comments – the team leader can communicate his/her comments and brief instructions on performance of the tasks to colleagues by posting text in appropriate sections (Comments) of the tasks, so they can be immediately delivered to all concerned employees;
  • Team Leader Notes – the team leader is enabled to provide co-workers with sharable and more complicated (extended) instructions through using Notes sections of the tasks;
  • Team Leader Charts – with a help of VIP Task Manager, the team leader can conduct the charts-based analysis of the workflow to assess matters of time, costs, etc;