Opportunities and Responsibilities in Taking Roles and

Sharing Leadership in Groups and Teams

DISCUSSION
Effective leadership brings together diverse people and helps them find common
purpose and work towards to achieve purposeful common goals. Effective
Leadership inspires and empowers people to realize their fullest potential and harness
their potentials to achieve common goals.

Leadership requires that you learn from your mistakes and continually work at
strengthening your weaknesses.

What Is Leadership?

A simple definition is that leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to

act toward achieving a common goal.
Leadership involves making sound -- and sometimes difficult -- decisions,
creating and articulating a clear vision, establishing achievable goals and providing
followers with the knowledge and tools necessary to achieve those goals.
Put even more simply, the leader is the inspiration for and director of the action.
They are the person in the group that possesses the combination of personality and
leadership skills to make others want to follow their direction.

Why leadership is important?

Leadership is an important factor for making an organization successful. It is the

art or process of influencing people to perform assigned tasks willingly, efficiently and
competently.
Without leadership a line manager simply cannot be effective. Leadership of the
line managers transforms potential into reality.
When good leadership is in place in the organization, it can be felt throughout the
entire organization. With good leadership, organizational culture is not forced but
developed.

What is Shared Leadership?

What is shared leadership? Marshall Goldsmith describes it this way in an

excellent post: “Shared leadership involves maximizing all of the human resources in
an organization by empowering individuals and giving them an opportunity to take
leadership positions in their areas of expertise. Also commonly thought of as the "serial
emergence" of multiple leaders over the life of a team, stemming from interactions
among team members in which at least one team member tries to influence other
members or the team in general.

With more complex markets increasing the demands on leadership, the job in
many cases is simply too large for one individual. Sharing leadership isn’t easy, but it’s
definitely possible, and in many cases, highly successful.
 Share Leadership Increases Team Performance

The researchers found that teams characterized by shared leadership had better
task performance than teams where leadership was not shared. Why?  Each team
member has a diverse set of skills, abilities, and expertise. In shared leadership, all
team members act as leaders and followers at different times. As a result, when
leadership is shared among team members, the team can leverage the expertise of
each individual at different times and in different ways.

4 ways to Share Leadership Responsibilities

1. Be a cheerleader rather than the boss.

2. Create a culture of empowerment.
3. Trust their expertise.
4. Appreciate their effort, energy and guts.

Sharing leadership demands emotional intelligence. Leaders who are strong in

several of these six emotional intelligence competencies will be more effective when
leading collaboratively.

1. Emotional Self-Awareness

Being aware of your own emotions and how they impact your actions offers a
strong platform for leading yourself. 

2. Emotional Self-Control

Once you’re aware of your emotions, you can better manage what you do with
them. Self-control allows you to pause before responding. 

3. Adaptability

When you’re sharing leadership, it helps to be able to adapt to styles and

strategies that may be different from what you would do if you were leading on your
own.

4. Empathy

While self-awareness allows you to understand your own feelings,

empathy shines a light on your co-leaders’ perspective.

5. Organizational Awareness

Leaders always need to recognize the big picture of their organization and its
culture and power relationships, as well as what’s going on between parts.

6. Conflict Management

Conflict is a given in all work settings and seems inevitable when two or more
people share leadership. To be effective in their collaboration, leaders need be skilled
at acknowledging and understanding different perspective, and capable of finding
common ground.
 Advantages and Disadvantages of Distributed/Shared Leadership Styles

ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES
1. It gives the company more options. 1. It can be a struggle to maintain
accountability.
2. It retains elements of the traditional chain- 2. It slows down the decision-
of-command. making process.

3. It shares the bigger picture with everyone. 3. It creates an expectation of

importance.
4. It allows people to take ownership over 4. It generates a certain level of
their work. uncertainty.
5. It provides upward movement 5. It requires leaders to have
opportunities. specified experience.
6. It creates the potential for a substantive 6. It can foster arguments.
change in the organization.

7. It gives everyone a chance to serve.

8. It emphasizes honesty.

9. It provides opportunities for mutual

learning.

Shared Leadership: The key to effectiveness?

Shared leadership also helps organizations progress, makes them more efficient,
and benefits their team in regards to less conflict, and more cohesion and trust.  It is
also thought that this shared team concept when applied to organizational leadership
in companies becomes the key to their effectiveness.

 According to Northouse (2016), “shared team leadership occurs when members

of the team take on leadership behaviors to influence the team and to maximize team
effectiveness. (pg. 365)

Another reason for the value of shared leadership is that even the best of leaders
need help making decisions.  It seems rare that organizations’ leaders have all the
skills and knowledge to make every decision.  It is for this reason that the concept of
shared leadership is the key to an effective organization.  According to Carson et. al.
(2007), “the complexity and ambiguity that teams often experience make it unlikely that
a single external leader can successfully perform all necessary leadership functions.”
(pg. 1217)

These team members “desire a greater opportunity to shape and participate in

the leadership functions of their teams” (Carson et. al 2007).  Not only is it good for the
autonomy of the team members, but it is also beneficial to the team chemistry.  It is
shown that “teams with shared leadership have less conflict, more consensus, more
trust, and more cohesion than teams that do not have shared leadership” (Northouse,
2016, pg. 365).
 There are also other benefits as stated by Carson et. al (2007), who wrote that
“when team members voluntarily and spontaneously offer their influence to others in
support of shared goals, shared leadership can provide organizations with competitive
advantage through increases in commitment, in the personal and organizational
resources brought to bear on complex tasks, in openness to reciprocal influence from
others, and in the sharing of information” (pg. 1217). These reasons provide the details
of why the team concept of shared leadership in my opinion is the key to the
effectiveness of any quality organization.

Team Leader

A team leader is someone who provides direction, instructions and guidance to a

group of individuals, who can also be known as a team, for the purpose of achieving a
certain goal. An effective leader will know her team members' strengths, weaknesses
and motivations.

Roles

Team leaders serve various roles in an organization. Their job is to get tasks
done by using all of the resources available to them, including other employees
or team members.

Important roles a team leader must often take on:

○Develop a strategy the team will use to reach its goal

○Provide any training that team members need
○Communicate clear instructions to team members
○Listen to team members' feedback
○Monitor team members' participation to ensure the training they are being provided is
being put into use, and also to see if any additional training is needed
○Manage the flow of day-to-day operations
○Create reports to update the company on the team's progress
○Distribute reports to the appropriate personnel

Responsibilities

A team leader is responsible for guiding a group of employees as they complete

a project. They are responsible for developing and implementing a timeline their team
will use to reach its end goal. Some of the ways team leaders ensure they reach their
goals is by delegating tasks to their members, including themselves.

Qualities of a Good Leader:

1. Honesty and Integrity - Leaders succeed when they stick to their values and
core beliefs and without ethics, this will not be possible.

2. Confidence - A leader should at least reflect the degree of confidence required

to ensure that your followers trust you as a leader.

3. Inspire others - As a leader, should think positive and this positive approach
should be visible through your actions. Stay calm under pressure and keep
the motivation level up. As John Quincy Adams puts it, “If your actions inspire
others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a
leader.”

4. Commitment and passion - Leader must motivate its followers to achieve

common goal.
5. Good communicator - A good communicator can be a good leader. Words
have the power to motivate people and make them do the unthinkable. If you
use them effectively, you can also achieve better results.

6. Decision-making capabilities - Taking right decision at the right time and

standing on the decision that was made. It is also important to consult other
members in making such decisions.

7. Accountability - Arnold H Glasow when he said, “A good leader takes little

more than his share of the blame and little less than his share of the credit.”
Make sure that every one of your subordinates is accountable for what they
are doing.

8. Creativity and Innovation - Creative thinking and constant innovation is what

makes you and your team stand out from the crowd. Think out of the box to
come up with unique ideas and turn those ideas and goals into reality.