How to be a good Team Leader — Responsibilities + FREE TEMPLATE

Team Leaders play an important role in every organization and company, and to perform their best, Team Leaders should have a clearly defined set of duties and responsibilities they need to look out for, but also possess certain competencies. 

Here at Bornfight, we try to define key areas of every TL (let’s use this for the Team Leader as I’ll be mentioning this a lot throughout this blog) and all the responsibilities and competencies every TL should have and should be aware of. That’s why we wrote down a list with a FREE TEMPLATE that helps our TL to lead their teams the best they can.

To find out all about the responsibilities and competencies of every TL here at Bornfight, keep reading!

#1 Team 

Organization & Planning

Let’s begin with the basic responsibility of every TL — to plan teamwork, and set annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals. As a TL, you are keeping track of the whole teams’ performance, monitoring the individual performance of every team member and setting clear expectations by assigning responsibilities and tasks. Every TL should be capable to coordinate and inform the team by organizing weekly (and if necessary, more or less frequent) team meetings that cover the current progress on projects, goals and KPI’s.

Other than that, as a TL, you should develop and plan the organizational structure within the department or team and based on that, identify the needs and plan to hire new team members, while keeping in mind the business strategy of the whole company or organization. When that part is covered, the next important step is to ensure that hiring a new person is in line with the organizational capabilities, and income and expenses of the whole team. While hiring a new team member, your task is to define the job description and employment criteria for open positions and participate in the recruitment process, such as advertising and promotion of open jobs, but also sourcing through social media channels and networking. This process is managed in cooperation with POPS and Marketing teams that can help attract the best potential candidates for every job opening and open selection. 

After the first round of applications arrives, you are responsible for participating in the selection process that includes reviewing candidate applications, creating and reviewing professional assignments, participating in interviews, and conducting the final interview. When this is all set, you have to make the final decision on employment, create an individual onboarding plan for new members and assign a mentor (and if necessary, provide mentorship to certain team members).

Other than onboarding new employees, your responsibility is also the onboarding process when a certain employee decides to leave the company. In this case, you need to ensure the transfer of knowledge and responsibilities to the whole team and other team members, and suggest the next steps and plans for new hires.

Development & Growth

As a TL, your responsibility is to define educational needs for the team, organize both internal and external team trainings, and propose conferences and other meetups that would benefit the teams’ development and growth. 

Here at Bornfight, this role also comes with the responsibility for continuous mentoring, coaching and advising team members, as well as biannual structured meeting that involves feedback from both a TL and team member, expressing what motivates and demotivates a team member and his or hers satisfaction with the environment, the organization of work and other people working in the organization or a company. 

After every biannual structured meeting about development, our TLs define individual development plans according to the interests of team members and the needs of the company, set clear expectations and KPIs, continuously provide feedback to team members, propose rewards for team members to the board, such as promotion, education, bonus, days off, etc., and communicate those decisions. If there is a drop in performance for a certain team member, a TL organizes an intervention procedure according to the Low to Great procedure and tracks the progress of an individual. 

Culture & Satisfaction

Other than taking care of the organization and planning process in a team, you should also monitor working conditions for each employee and look out for contracts, salaries, and, if there are students in a team, plan their working hours. Your task is also to and monitor vacation days, sick leave, days off and overtime for every team member. 

When a new person arrives in the team, there is usually a probationary period that lasts a couple of months and a TL is the one that makes a decision on the continuation or termination of cooperation (and also if a team member is on Low to Great period or working on a fixed-term contract). 

Your responsibility is tracking the team members’ personal development, which includes organizing Quality Time meetings, team buildings, different team gatherings such as team lunches, game nights and other team activities. The person working on this role should also continuously monitor the satisfaction of every individual in a team with work, team and organization, and work on developing team culture and desirable behaviors within the team.

#2 Business and Finances

Let’s now talk about the business aspect and responsibilities that are focused on business development, financial monitoring, strategy and promotion. 

Quality assurance and business optimization

One of TL’s responsibilities is to set standards and to take care of the quality of the work, as well as to research, define and implement different business-related processes and tools that can improve the quality of the team’s output. By continuously monitoring and examining client satisfaction, as a TL, you take care of the project’s quality and business optimization.

Strategy implementation and business development

In this part, responsibilities revolve around strategy, such as suggesting and implementing a development strategy and informing other leaders and team members about it, but also following trends and competition, introducing and testing business innovations, informing and educating team members and others about changes in the business.

Financial monitoring 

When we talk about the financial aspect of every team, you should track the income and expenses of the team, monitor the resources spent in certain parts of the business and take care of the profitability by optimizing activities, processes, distributions within the team.

Business and team promotion

As a TL, you are the company’s and team’s personal influencer — your responsibility is to externally promote business, services and team to build the company’s image to the outside world, and you should also take care of internal reports on the progress and innovations of services, business and team.

#3 Operational Work on Projects

Every TL is also involved in the operational tasks of project teams, and his/her engagement varies between 5% and 80%, depending on the size of the team that TL is assigned to. Here at Bornfight, if a TL is responsible for 1 or 2 team members, his project involvement can go up to 80%, but if there are 8 or more team members in the team, and one TL is responsible for them, his/her engagement is around 5% to minimize the overload with operational work and to help TL to focus on team members and their development.

Team Lead Responsibilities FREE TEMPLATE 

Now that we covered the responsibilities of a Team Lead role, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you a TEMPLATE you can try and use for free, as it can help you define which areas of your work are below expectations, which ones meet the expectations, and which ones you rock!

GET YOUR FREE TEMPLATE

How to be a good Team Leader part 2 — Competencies 

In this part of the blog series, we covered top TL responsibilities that cover team, business and operational work, and now it’s time to talk about competencies connected to this role. I didn’t want to overload you with information in this blog, so I saved that topic for the next one that I’ll dedicate to 8 Team Lead Competencies — self-awareness, communication, people development, business acumen, strategic planning & focus, managing processes & resources, decision-making and change management. Find out more about them in this blog!