Chapter 2. Matching leadership styles to team phases
This chapter covers
- Three team phases
- Leadership types
- Goals for team leaders
This chapter is a quick guide to recognizing the three team phases and the leadership types that make the most sense for each phase.
First, let’s clarify why we need to define these phases. The reasons have to do with our overall goal as team leaders. What do you think your role is as a team leader? For a few years, I had to guess. Nobody told me and I had no one to learn from.
Before we go on, I want to clarify the terms used in this book. The words phase and mode are used almost interchangeably throughout the book. For example, in the learning phase you go into learning mode. Phase is where you think your team is; mode is how you react to which phase you’re in. Think of it like the fight-or-flight instincts that we all have. When these instincts take over, we act a certain way. So you might say that when we recognize we are in the survival phase, we initiate our survival instinct or survival mode. Or if we recognize that we’re operating in learning mode while our organization is operating in survival mode, we can say we’re in a survival phase and we should initiate survival mode behavior and instinct.
In the past, one of my biggest mistakes as a team leader was that I didn’t recognize that my style of leadership was oblivious to the needs of my team.