Resources on How to Effectively Lead Your Team

Our mission at Nonprofit Marketing Guide is to help you:

1. Learn Your Job
2. Love Your Work
3. Lead Your Team

We focus a lot on the top two, so today I wanted to share some tips, research and advice about effectively leading your teams.

Our past research shows that 75% of nonprofit communications teams are organized in one of four ways based on how the workload for the team is created.

The two most effective teams based on our research are Integrated and Centralized. You can see more on these team models in our 2017 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report (Free Membership Required).

Now let’s talk about some ways to best work with your team.

Ask yourselves these questions from Kivi’s 5 Strategic Conversations Your Comms Team Should Be Having:

1. How can we think further ahead?
2. How can we collaborate more effectively?
3. How can we build more trust in the team?
4. What can we let go of (even just temporarily)?
5. How can we get more mileage from what we already do?

Candace Doby shared these 4 Effective Ways To Collaborate With Your Team:

1. Understand your role as a leader by clarifying goals and encouraging participation from all members.
2. Understand your team’s perception of collaboration by learning what their definition of “collaboration” is.
3. Understand your team’s motivations by knowing their personal goals.
4. Understand each team member’s strengths by assigning projects that align with the right skill sets.

Matt Duczeminski gives us 6 Actions Successful Leaders Take To Enhance The Collaboration Of Their Teams:

1. Make your expectations known
2. Have a system to share information
3. Promote engagement
4. Model flexibility
5. Be a problem solver
6. Be a participant

Having trouble collaborating?

Kivi shares 4 Steps to Work Through Collaboration Problems:

1. Name the problem
2. Help others see it
3. Design simple rules
4. Set personal boundaries

And if you are still all working remotely, Elizabeth Grace Saunders has Tips for Effective Virtual Collaboration:

1. Use regular meetings
2. Share documents
3. Work “side by side”
4. Message away