Roles of a Team Lead

As a team lead you may need to fulfill many different roles in a team. In this post, I’ll highlight few of the roles which will be useful from Mintzberg's Management Roles theory. Let’s see how we can use these to improve team performance.

Figurehead Role 

This is a ceremonial role which involved humans. As a team lead in Software firm you are required to get involved with two parties who are knowledge workers. Those parties they are, the customer and the team. In the modern world, I believe people interaction is a key and you shouldn't play this role as a rule or part of your routine job. It has to be more informal approach. Hence you need to please both parties to have successful deliveries.

Leader Role 

There is a saying stating that ‘people leave managers not the company’. You have to be a manger who will lead the team. That’s where you need to come up with your leadership skills to lead the team. As a team lead you need to lead the customer as well. As a leader you are responsible to lead by example. When you set examples it’s easy for you to lead the team to the desired objectives.

As a leader it’s important to motivate and encourage the team due to the fact that the software industry is a place where it involves lot of stress. Therefore team might end up in stressful situations. Hence a Leader should lead them to overcome their challengers and get back on to the right track, if not team will not be able to move in the right direction

Liaison Role 

It’s important to extend your reach to the outside world as a responsible person. This will help you build up your personal branding. These type of personalities will be considered as brand ambassadors of a company. How can you do this;

• Do external sessions at professional gathering and Universities
• Attend professional gatherings
• Actively involved in panel discussions at profession gatherings

Monitor Role

Monitoring is one of the main roles you need to play as a team Leader. The main areas of monitoring involves customer delivery, the effectiveness and the efficiency of the team and managing new team members.

Deliveries could happen in every couple of weeks/months, thus monitoring the progress is very important. You need to make sure the progress is between controlled levels. Another aspect of the monitoring is the Quality of delivery. It’s important to make sure that you deliver the expected quality every time. There are measurements for this which needs to be referred to, and also gain an understanding where there are outliers which will be hazards.

Monitoring team effectiveness and efficiency is another important aspect. There can be drops. So therefore it’s important to understand the environment. Environment has official aspects as well as the team members’ personal aspects. Therefore a Lead will have to scan and monitor all these aspects. Other than the KPI for monitoring I use techniques such as having discussions with the team.

Disseminator Role 

This is a role of a person who makes sure the information flows to all the necessary parties. When you are working with a team and the team is just focused on the team deliveries, they tend to lose the focus of the organization happenings.

It’s therefore important to update the team on the company information such as company goals, objectives, business decisions, and new standards to follow. This will help the team to understand the changes to be made and how to contribute to value additions. This will help to with aligning career goals with company goals.

Sometimes this role can be named as a facilitator role where this role bridges the gap between employees and the management. 

Entrepreneur Role

You need to consider your team as an organization and you have set up goals and objectives to the team. In order to achieve this the team need to have discussions regularly about these goals and its progress. 

To achieve great success you need to make sure that you free up the space where team members can come up with ideas to improve their existing work 

So Therefore at the end of every year you need to review the year performance and use these learnings to plan the following year. 

Disturbance Handler Role 

The role can be called as a ‘protector’ to minimize the disturbance to the team. When a disturbance happens, the team will be under pressure and that’s a recipe to get more issues. Thus, it’s important to handle issues and disturbances. These disturbance comes in different forms and I should be vigilant enough to understand these.

When the disturbance are controlled, team has the environment to work effectively and efficiently 

Negotiator Role 

This is a role a lead will play knowingly or unknowingly every day. There are many situations to negotiate. There are 3 parties where negotiation could take place;

• Team members
• Customer
• Management and other employees

If you look at above parties, they don’t have the same level of problems and they don’t have the same level of characteristics. So it’s important to understand them and change the negotiation strategies based on the situation.

Reference: Mintzberg's Management Roles