The Team Leader Role – How to Set it Up to Work

Prefer to watch on video than read?  Click here – 5 mins with captions.

The Team Leader role.  Called lots of things – sometimes ‘Team Leader’, older-school names are ‘Supervisor’ and ‘Leading Hand’, modern names are ‘Coordinator’.

Then we have the Manager role.  Sometimes called that, often now called ‘Team Leader’ because management has  apparently become evil, and in the US this role can be called ‘Supervisor’. 

And before you get started on ‘hierarchy is bad’, remember that most of us work in hierarchies, and it remains the optimal structure in many situations.

If it’s run well.  Which is what this is about.

Radical Competence – Leadership Lessons from Captain Hanks

Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here to watch the video, 5 mins, with captions. 

(Previous videos here BTW)

This week I break down a scene from Tom Hank’s new film Greyhound, which he wrote from the book The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester.  To get the full effect, it’s really best to watch the video.

What you’ll see is an example of a small, agile organisation responding to the conditions at hand.  The organisation is made up of two Allied navy ships, and the conditions are attacking a German U-Boat that is threatening the convoy they are escorting across to Europe in World War II.  Here’s what we learn:

Work Models You Need to Know Ep. 1 – The Four Managerial Roles of Ichak Adizes

Want to watch the video of this? Just click here!

Today’s article is the first in a new series called “Work Models You Need To Know”.  In this series I describe and summarise in each instalment one of the models that I find useful to help my clients understand certain issues that are in their organisation, and what to do about it.

This time, it’s the Four Managerial Roles, and it’s from Dr. Ichak Adizes, an organisational consulting legend who has been in the game for decades.

Dr. Ichak Adizes

Adizes is best known for the Corporate Lifecycle, a fantastic model on how enterprises come into existence, how they grow toward what he calls ‘Prime’, and then how they can decay and sometimes even die.  It looks like this: