Am I leading my team correctly? Thoughts every leader has!

Leadership is always defined by how good a leader should be or what are those things that can make a person a better leader, but none of the articles would describe what actually goes through a leaders mind when he is juggling between his responsibilities and keeping his team up and excited to do their work.

His efforts in balancing all the aspects of business, from bringing in the new project to ensuring that it gets delivered on time, there are many thoughts that go through his mind which no one other than him deals with. With this blog, we are enlightening some of those unspoken queries of a leader’s life that a person actually feels while leading others.

• Will my words hurt someones feeling

Being a leader, you have to be strict sometimes, not to show your authority, but just to make sure things are not taken for granted. Showing casual behavior for your work by a team leader will leave the same impact on the people working under him.

So to ensure everything works in its accounts, a leader at times has to become rude. Here it doesn’t mean he can shout on anyone but can be a little more strict with his team for the deadlines. During this phase of taking things under control, some leaders get into the dilemma of whether they would sound to their people? Would he be disrespected after being rude to them? Will, it hurt someone’s self-respect? 

This all questions are taken into account when in a leader’s mind before he plans to take any action against his team.

• What if the decision turns out wrong 

Leaders tend to have decision-making skills and are pre-assumed that their decisions can never be wrong. Well, this is not the case in reality. 

Leaders are also humans, they make decisions looking at the situations and from their experience, assuming that they will always be right creates an unseen pressure on them to make the right judgment even for the things they have never been through.

As soon as a leader makes a decision he/she is never confident about, the first question that arrives in their mind is “What if the decision turns out to be wrong?” and thus his mind starts looking for a backup plan.

• People are watching me

The next thing that keeps a leader under constant pressure is that he is being consistently observed by his team and the people working with him. Leaders are often framed as people with the right perspective and are assumed to go right things only.

Well, they are human too!

Often many leaders find it as pressure as before doing anything whether personally or professionally they have to think about the people who are looking up to them as their ideal. They know that their one unrealistic step towards any aspect might impact many people connected with him and are influenced by his actions.

So being a mentor to all of them, he has to be conscious about his deeds and the steps he/she takes in front of them.

• Can my team survive without me?

The responsibility of a leader doesn’t stop with making plans and showing directions to the team, but to make them capable enough to work smoothly even in his absence.

Making your team dependent on yourself will eventually act as a reason for their weakness as they will feel under-confident to do something when you are not around. This dependency will create delays in the project delivery and a leader has to remain present in every aspect of the business to give the validation. 

But what if a leader is not available for a specific period or is leaving the firm due to some reason? Will the team stop working? Will not they suffer or be under-confident about their work being done as per the need or not.

A leader has to think about all of it…

•  Are people growing under my leadership?

The last and the most important thought that a leader has at every interval of time is whether he is helping his team to grow. The day to day tasks and the deadlines might make the team do the same things every day, barely giving some time to improve themselves in terms of knowledge and their physical and mental health. 

Being a good leader, the person might have this thought whether he is giving his team that me time to grow. Is he doing something for them that can help them in their career or otherwise? Apart from just assigning work and taking the reports, how can he make some extra efforts to help everyone grow together as a team as well as individually?

Summing Up

Leading others can be fun, the experience differs for every single person. The people around have glamorized the version of being a good leader such that we forget that they too need some space and time for themselves to make their mistakes. 

They have all things on their mind whether on-duty or off-duty, so are their thoughts continuously revolving around making efforts to be a better leader. Above are some of them which I have focused upon, but there is much more than this that is swirling around in their headspace.

Author Bio:

James Vargas is an experienced business expert, consultant, and manager at Get Everything Delivered, startup consulting services. He has 1.5-decade corporate experience and is tailoring the best project delivery practices to the start-up owners based on his knowledge to solve start-up business problems to great revenue for their business.