Team Leadership

Leadership can be achieved effectively through teams and in fact it may be the most important element in whether teams succeed or fail according to some researchers. Hill's model for team leadership is shown below. The first box, labeled leadership decisions, suggests that the decisions you make as a leader directly affects team effectiveness through internal and external actions that some leaders may take or decide not to take. This may be broken down even further into task, relational, and environmental factors that may be taken into effect if considering internal or external actions.

As described in Hill's model, leadership decisions and actions result in team effectiveness. Teams can be successful through leaders who are committed to people and are willing to serve and give support to members of the team. Team leaders should continually push for improvement and must know when it is appropriate to change the coach or team members.

As a leader of a volleyball team, I have to be able to lead my team to victory and know what appropriate coaching tactics are necessary and when to enforce them. For example, our team recently traveled to play in a tournament where the prize of winning was a scholarship. This was very important to my team and we knew we would have to work hard as a team in order to achieve our goal. Throughout the entire game, as a leader, I knew when my team needed pushed or when they needed encouragement where as, if I had of just yelled at my team the whole game, we may not have been as successful. By following Hill's model for team leadership,when our team was down by 4 at the end of the game, I took action by making the decision to take my best player out of the game who was having an off night. This task based decision ensured that I was focused on the goal and did what I had to do in order to achieve it. Because of the decisions I made as the leader of my team, we were able to achieve our goal and we walked away with the desired scholarship.