The Art of Building Relationships: Teamwork

‘‘Most teams have certain individuals who are primarily responsible for defining team goals and for developing and structuring the team to accomplish these missions’’, in other words, every team member has his specific role and a work that he is responsible for (Marks, Rittman and Zaccaro, par. 4). These roles exist even in self-managing teams; leadership processes represent perhaps the most critical factor in the success of organizational teams (Marks, Rittman and Zaccaro par. 4).

Leadership is a profession that involves many different skills. Leader should know, at least something, about technical aspects of manufacturing, modern situation of economy and secrets of human psychology. However, the performance of executive, which is connected to his relationship with subordinates, occupies a key position in terms of success of a leader in general. No matter how talented and hardworking boss is, if his efforts are not supported by subordinates, the result of team’s activity won’t be successful. The work of the whole team really depends on interpersonal relations between a boss and his employees. Finding proper style of building relationships with coworkers is the basis in getting their respect. To establish good relationships with the employees managers should develop several qualities. Firs of all, ‘‘The ability to encourage team members to meet organizational demands is a key element of the overall leadership development picture; leaders are tasked with effectively guiding organizational goal achievement while considering team members’ skills necessary to produce the desired outputs; a focus on balancing talent development with organizational goal achievement will place the company on a trajectory of achieving performance success’’ (Starks, par. 1). In addition to the ability to motivate subordinates leader should has some other qualities such as ‘‘ability to create vision, understand organizational culture, focus on performance development, and encourage innovation’’ (Starks, par. 2).Having proper leader’s qualities is not enough to organize an effective teamwork. Leaders have to fulfill following tasks in order to provide smooth team processes: first, he has to ‘‘structure, search, and evaluate information regarding the team’s goals’’; Second, ‘’team leader is responsible to make a concrete plan how the goals can be achieved and how team resources should be coordinated’’; third, ‘‘he has to manage personnel and material resources’’ (Herre, par. 6)

The model shown in this table is ‘‘useful to determine differential influences a team leader can have in order to link team processes and team performance to specific leadership styles’’ (Herre, par. 7).

There several types of relationships between the leader and a team; for example, mentoring and self leadership. Mentoring is used to sponsor, support and train less-experienced employees. Mentor usually a senior employee or a manager who takes new inexperienced workers under their control. Usually such practice has positive influence on team performance: it improves workers’ skills, increases company’s outcomes and develops relationship between leaders and subordinates (Starks, par. 8-10). On the other hand, self-leadership has its own advantages. Self-leadership is a set of processes though which individuals control performance of their group. Even in this type of teams exists roles differentiation that creates the situation in which some people have higher positions than others.