The Three Team Leadership Tasks

The team leader has three overall tasks to perform: to create the conditions that enable the team to do its job; to build and maintain the team as a performing unit; and to coach and support the team to success (see Hackman, 2002 for an extended exploration of these three tasks).

First, creating the right conditions means ensuring that the team has a clear task to perform (and one that is best done by a team) and making sure the team has the resources it needs to do its work. This means that sometimes the leader has to fight to ensure the team gets the necessary budget, accommodation, IT equipment or other tools to do its job effectively. The team leader does not need to be wonderfully bountiful in this since that encourages waste and inefficiency. But the leader should be adamant and unapologetic about arguing for the resources the team needs to get its job done. It is also important for the team’s members to be clear about who is and isn’t in your team – the boundaries of the team. Some healthcare teams are compo....