How to improve your teamwork skills as a senior leader
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Senior leaders with strong teamwork skills can help to ensure an organization's smooth operation. By building relationships with their teams and encouraging collaboration across their organizations, senior leaders can increase organizational innovation and productivity.
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What do senior leaders do?
Senior leaders guide organizational strategy, oversee budgets, and supervise other managers. They shoulder high levels of responsibility, as they're directly accountable for the performance of the people working under them.
A 2023 Forbes analysis highlighted how important it is for senior leaders to empower their team members in order to foster productive and collaborative organizational culture.
At the same time, Harvard Business Review notes that senior leaders walk a fine line when managing teams. Pushing the right buttons can drive employee engagement and unlock better performance, but overdoing it introduces pressures that can have negative impacts.
By improving teamwork through executive education programs in management and leadership, you can build skills to help your organization thrive.
What teamwork skills do senior leaders need?
Senior leaders with strong teamwork skills can align people in pursuit of a shared goal. In practice, this means delegating responsibilities in a way that taps into the unique strengths of each team member.
Building teamwork skills requires a combination of both hard and soft skills. You'll need to be a strong communicator and effective at managing interpersonal dynamics. Conflicts will arise, and knowing how to mediate and resolve them can help.
Effective team leaders also maintain a continuous focus on growth. This includes their own professional growth and that of the people working under them, along with growth for the organization.
The following table summarizes skills to target as you explore how to improve teamwork as a senior leader:
Teamwork skills for senior leaders
| Soft skills | Hard skills |
|---|---|
| Communication | Negotiation and conflict mediation |
| Decision making | Active listening |
| Emotional intelligence | Dependency mapping |
| Time management | Problem framing and analysis |
Tips for senior leaders who want to improve teamwork
Senior leaders can tap into many strategies for improving teamwork and their ability to inspire collaborative effort. These five tips can help you get started:
Tip 1: Get to know every member of your team
Building rapport with the people you're leading can help them feel more engaged in the organization. It also helps establish respect and trust, which are essential foundations of a productive professional relationship.
You'll also develop deeper insights into each team member's strengths and limitations. This can help you to delegate tasks in a way that prepares team members to succeed.
Tip 2: Identify and communicate a goal or mission
Teams function best when everyone is on the same page, working toward a common goal. When managing teams, senior leaders can drive results by identifying a specific objective or desired outcome, mapping a pathway for reaching it, and tracking continual progress.
Tip 3: Include teamwork in performance evaluations
Senior leaders often evaluate the performance of middle managers and other junior colleagues. You can use performance evaluations as an opportunity to foster a collaborative culture in your team dynamics.
Tip 4: Create a system for navigating disagreement
When functioning in teams, people are bound to have different ideas about how to approach tasks and goals. By creating an open and consistent system for navigating those disagreements, you can foster goodwill, trust, and transparency among your team members.
Tip 5: Educate yourself
Many of the most accomplished senior leaders never stop learning. Professional development workshops can offer an efficient path to enhancing targeted skills, such as teamwork. Consider an executive education program in management focused specifically on team leadership.