Leadership Roles and Issues

Leadership Roles

Leaders are leaders because they’re asked to face new challenges and take on new roles all the time. The most successful of them are able to adjust and put their leadership skills to work in these new atmospheres. Let’s take a look at some of the demands today’s business are asking their leaders to shoulder.

Providing Team Leadership

We discussed teams and team management in an earlier module. But what of the organization that decides to adopt a team approach. Traditional leadership roles are very different from that of a team leader. How do leaders move from a world of individualism to one of teams?

The command-and-control aspects in the world of individualism no longer make sense in the team environment, so this is one reason why some leaders find it impossible to adapt. Those leaders that have a more authoritarian style are likely to struggle and even fail here. But those that have a strong participative leadership style might take to team leadership like an organizational duck to water, and a large percentage of those with other leadership styles can adapt and learn.

Leaders being asked to become effective team leaders are expected to share information, give up authority, trust others and understand when to intervene. They often act more as facilitators than they do leaders. It’s often a bit of a balancing act—especially at first—to determine when a team needs more autonomy and when the leader needs to jump in.

Management

Leaders often assume the “management” responsibilities around a team, like coaching, handling disciplinary issues, reviewing performance, training and communication. In addition, team leaders need to take on these four roles:

• Liaisons with external constituencies. The team leader represents the team to all external parties, including upper management, customers and suppliers. In this capacity, the team leader can obtain resources for the team, clarify expectations with outside parties and seek out information necessary for the team to do its job.
• Troubleshooter. Team leaders are often called upon to solve team problems, whether they’re internal or whether they need external intervention, like gaining additional resources.
• Conflict managers. When disagreements occur, the team leader helps to manage them in an equitable way and tries to minimize the disruption of the disagreement.
• Coaches. Team leaders are looked upon to provide coaching and even some cheerleading, to support and improve the team’s performance.

It’s with these four roles that team leaders focus on managing the team’s external boundary and facilitate the team’s process.

New Technology

A retail company is testing the use of artificial intelligence for their email marketing. An employee writes an email that lets their customers know about an event or a sale going on in the store that weekend. Artificial intelligence then writes seven more email subject lines for that same email. They send all eight to a test group of their loyal shoppers, and over the course of a couple hours, the company is able to determine which of those eight subject lines entices customers to open the email. That subject line is then put on emails to all the other loyal customers in the retail chain.

The objective of using artificial intelligence to write emails is to attempt to increase email open rates. In fact, this retail company is experiencing a 5% increase in open rates, which translates to approximately eight more transactions per weekend in each of the retail chain’s stores across the country.

A leader was once called upon to manage the employee who was clever enough to write a subject line that enticed customers to open emails. Now that leader is tasked with identifying technology that will help them increase the effectiveness of their email marketing programs, but they need to manage that technology, and the employees who are manipulating that technology for results.

Technology will disrupt the workforce (that retail company didn’t need to hire a marketer to write emails, after all) and it will provide all the “big data” the leader could ever want to make decisions about how to market to customers. Technology is an ever-changing tide of new information that’s difficult to stay on top of and difficult to manage once its within the walls of the organization. Leaders must find a way to provide guidance for employees, reinforce the company’s mission and vision, and incorporate these new options into daily operations