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Course Contents (Back)
- What is a leader: how to be one, contributions to the team.
- Style and coaching of leaders.
- Transparency and credibility attributes.
- Management of expectations and compensation.
- Managing high-performance teams in difficult or far-away locations.
- Leadership failure in international projects.
Objectives
- Obtaining an acquaintance into leadership skills.
- Knowing how to manage work teams in international projects with various
locations.
Available Languages:  
Learning Unit Summary
In this module we will learn how to be a leader and we will acquire the
necessary skills to manage work teams. Moreover, we will analyse how
High-Performance teams work and why leaders fail. Finally, we will study
what to do in case of failure of a team leader or other key person in an
international project.
Before defining the characteristics that a leader must have, we have to
explain what a leader is. A leader is a person who combines a series of
skills, knowledge and attitudes, and in this case applied to an
international (or several) project.
A leader presents the following main characteristics:
- He/she leads by rather by example than simply by words.
- Motivates his/her employees.
- Plans flexibly but is organised.
- Knows what risks are to be taken.
- Thinks constantly in the client.
- etc...
The following diagram shows different qualities relating to personality
and behaviour which are necessary to be a project leader.
The basic leadership styles are the following:
- Employer (classic) Style: A style where the leader gives orders and
takes all decisions.
- Paternalistic Style: A style where the leader motivates his/her
employees by being like an old-style father, who looks down on team
members, and thinks he is more experienced.
- Participative Style: A style where the project leader collaborates
and negotiates all decisions with the team members, decisions are
usually taken in committees.
- Permissive Style: A style where the leader delegates all tasks, and
where decisions are taken by people in charge of the tasks.
Coaching team members means giving people the opportunity to put into
practise the necessary functions and activities to develop their best
capacities and professional challenges.
High-performance teams are those made up of a reduced number of people
featuring complementary capacities and deploying them irrespective of
environment, deadlines, pressure, etc. These team members have a purpose and
at least some common objective and are mutually responsible for them.
A leader can fail due to different reasons. These are the most important:
- Inability to give details to team.
- Unwillingness to render modest contribution on the operational
tasks.
- Expectations of being remunerated for what they “know” instead of
for what they do with their knowledge.
- Worrying too much about his/her followers and competitors.
- Lack of imagination.
- Egotism.
- Lack of restraint in public.
- Disloyalty to the team, sponsor, client, etc.
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