The Team Leader Of The Future

What should he or she look like?

If work is truly getting more complicated — may or may not be true — then who your team leader is matters a lot. Here’s the problem, though: 82 percent of managerial hires end up being the wrong one. That’s an 8 in 10 failure rate. Uh. Not good. Since most managers are the team leader for a certain team, this is probably something we should care more about. Unfortunately, we often don’t. Executives tend to care about product (or service) and process. People are a distant third “P.” If you don’t believe me, let me give you one clear counter-example. Hiring — i.e. how you acquire people who drive your business forward — is rooted in Human Resources. If executives cared about hiring at all, do you think it would reside in that department? No. Human Resources is treated as a joke by most executives, and has been for decades. Any project coming out of there is much closer to “cover your ass” or “compliance” than “business growth.” You absolutely need to recognize that.

So, this is the first problem: we need to think critically and strategically about the team leader of the future, but … everything around hiring, developing, and training people is “owned” by a department that execs could care less about. That’s not good. Let’s walk through exactly why it’s not good, then try to solve it a bit. Onward!