Article from the California Management Review; Winter 2000; 42, 2

Important characteristics of effective team leaders:

• Communication: both intra-personal and inter-personal as well as intra-organization and extra-organizational. A clear communication of expectations to team members, and a facilitation of communication between group members as well as outside the team. An information-rich environment is essential.
• Responsibility: Set goals, guide members, share burden; but be a coach and mentor not an autocrat.
• Autonomy: the team leader needs high levels of autonomy as well as do the team members. It is necessary that all involved be committed and interested. Team members need to come to “own” the process. The team leader should be a coach, who guides people and points them in the right direction; who empowers team members.
• Involvement: for all team members and stakeholders across all stages of a project; this helps to guard against functional silos.
• Balance: of technical and human issues. The human issues are often overlooked but are at least as important as the technical issues.

Effective leadership is “easier said than done” and there is often a falling into the knowing-doing gap. One’s guard needs to be up against letting talk substitute for action. Knowing some characteristics of effective leadership does not produce effective leadership. A transformation of the leader’s thinking, learning and doing (and the concomitant transformation that happens with the team members) is the path to effective leadership.

Many of us have been in team situations where cross-functional teams fall into functional silos in disparate thought worlds. Many problems develop from one team making decisions that make micro sense in the context of their own team but make macro nonsense when viewed from the big picture or even from the viewpoint of other teams. Workflows and activities tend to be disorganized and uncoordinated for the big picture. Keeping in mind the big picture view and losing turf-battleground mentalities and fostering collaborative decision making can help guard against functional silos.