Leadership - A discussion of traits, characteristics, and current news of leaders.

How does teamwork affect the success of an organization? What should a leader know about the dynamics of teams and how they function?

The Center for Creative Leadership recently published the results of a survey on teams. The report, The State of Teams: A Center for Creative Leadership Research Report provides insight to the challenges, needs and functioning of teams in today's organizations.

The report indicates that effective leaders should:

Make teamwork central to organization. Teams play a valuable role in organizational success. Ninety-one percent of respondents agreed that "Teams are central to organizational success; only 11 percent agreed that "Teams are on the decline."

Be multi-talented. Team leaders must be strong communicators and diplomats who also have project management skills, such as organization, decision-making and prioritization. Personal attributes-such as intellectual ability, flexibility and courage-are also aspects of an effective team leader.

Collaborate. Collaboration across teams is a significant determinant of success. Leaders face the challenge of collaborating with multiple teams who may have different - even competing – goals and must be able to work across boundaries, negotiate, network, influence and build relationships.

These recommendations were based on the data that identified three variables that may prove most challenging for team leaders:

• Conflicts. More than 90 percent of respondents reported that they serve on more than one team at a time. In addition to the obvious resource challenges, these findings suggest team leaders are dealing with the challenges of multiple team memberships and may be saddled with members who cannot fully commit to a task.
• Distributed workforce. Approximately two-thirds of respondents reported that team members are geographically dispersed. Teams and leaders may struggle to effectively coordinate and communicate with increasingly virtual teams.
• Limited Resources. Only half of respondents said "sponsors are in place to guide team success." This is potentially a challenge for team leaders because they may be asked to navigate their organization without advocates.

These challenges appear to most often result in teams that function below the optimal level. As the work force becomes more distributed and teams work across geographic and cultural borders and use a multitude of communication platforms, leaders will be required to focus more on managing across teams, resolving conflicts, allocating resources and facilitating communication.

André Martin and Vidula Bal published The State of Teams: A Center for Creative Leadership Research Report. Click here to read the complete report.

Editor’s Note: I want to thank Brent Filson for contributing this post as a Guest Blogger on LeaderNotes.  Brent is the author of 23 books including THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

160 years ago, the newly invented electric telegraph carried the first news message. The message zipped 40 miles in a flash over wires from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.

The public was dazzled -- except Henry David Thoreau. He wrote: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

Today, we live in a Golden Age of communication. We have the Internet. We have faxes. We have e-mails. We have streaming video. We have on-line audio. We have RSS feeds. We have logs and blogs.

Yet today Thoreau is as right as rain. When it comes to really getting our messages across, we’re stuck in the Stone Age.

Here’s why. The vast majority of business leaders I’ve encountered are repeatedly making a huge mistake in communication, a mistake that’s screwing up their jobs and careers. They’re stuck giving presentations and speeches. They’re NOT giving Leadership Talks!