8000-250 Developing Yourself as a Team Leader

800-250, Developing Yourself as a Team Leader, the first module of the ILM Level 2 course that focuses on guiding the learners to becoming effective leaders who can coordinate activities within their specific teams. This unit aims at guiding the team leaders or supervisors within the organisation with developing the skills that are required to effectively develop a team and ensure that they put up strategies and interventions that push these teams into achieving the pre-assigned goals and objectives within the organisation.

As a team leader, it is important to ensure that one has an understanding of the skills, methods and approaches that can be used to improve the performance of the team and ensure that it contributes to meeting the organisational goals and objectives in general. This module focuses on this aspect of the organisation.

Aim and Objectives of the Module

The purpose and aim of this unit is to guide the leaders on understanding the duties and responsibilities of the team leader within a specific team. They are guided into understanding the role that the team leaders should play in facilitating improvement within the individual performance of the team members hence ensure that they improve the performance and quality of outcomes that are achieved from within their teams. The unit further provides the relationship between the team leader roles and the occupational standards that have been developed for the practices outlined within the course.

This is important in ensuring that the learners are able to lead their organisations in accordance with provided guidelines and principles hence ensuring that they achieve better performance while minimising the legal and ethical conflicts that could arise due to practices that are not aligned with the national occupational standards and legal provisions guiding their professional practice. 8000-250 is a critical module for any organisational leader, especially in the first line of management or the supervisors who are tasked with overseeing activities by smaller groups within the organisation.

Who Benefits from the Unit?

This unit is applicable to different levels of leaders. Leaders must understand the critical role they play in impacting the performance of individual employees within the organisation. They should appreciate the role that they can play to ensure that their teams are able to effectively achieve the goals and objectives that are assigned and the ability to improve the performance of the team to the expected standards. ILM Level focuses on team leaders and supervisors. As such, this unit is critical for this group of people who have direct interactions with team members and have the responsibility of influencing the team to perform effectively.

The unit is also significantly important to other leaders, including those dealing with human resources and the top management of the organisation. All these leaders and managers have the responsibility of creating an environment where the team they work with can perform better through creating a supportive environment and surrounding for team members. The unit provides guidance on the critical roles and responsibilities that they should play as well as strategies that can be used to collect information from the team members, which is important in improving the working within a team and the collaboration developed among team members.

Learning Outcomes

8000-250 is a unit that aims at improving the awareness of supervisors and the team members on the critical role that they play within their organisations. The learning outcomes are gauged by two main principles, which are the understanding of their roles as team leaders and supervisors and the ability to collaboratively work with team members to achieve the desired goals and objectives as a team. Upon completion of this unit, the learner should be able to:

• Outlines and list the roles of a team leader

• Identify the responsibilities of team leaders in the context of their teams

• List the limits that team leaders have in expressing their authority and accountability within the context of a team

• Identify specific scenarios that could necessitate referring an individual to senor authority while in the position of a team leader

• Collect feedback on the performance of an individual as a team leader

• Analyse the data to identify areas of strength and weakness

• Devise an individual improvement scheme that aims at addressing the identified weaknesses and improving the performance of the individual as a team leader

• Show understanding of the impact that the team leader could have within their organisations.

Key Areas of Learning

This unit is comprehensive in helping learners to develop as individuals as well as professionals in their positions as leaders of specific groups of people tasked with specific goals and objectives. Some of the key learning areas within the unit include

Roles and Responsibilities of the Team Leader

 The learners are guided into understanding the roles and responsibilities that a team leader is required to achieve. This process of learning helps to prepare the learners to become supervisors within their specific organisations. The course helps the learners to understand the duty that they should play in contextually applying the learned information and concept in their specific workplace and teams.

Limits of the Team Leader

There are limitations that are put in place for team leaders within organisations. The unit helps the learners to not only understand the roles that they play within their teams as well as the situations which require them to refer to senior authority. 8000-250 guides learners on their limits of authority, which implies functions that they can play, and accountability, which points to aspects that they can be held responsible for, as well as understanding how these factors were defined within the organisation to improve their performance as team leaders.

Skills and Abilities of the Team Leader

This is one of the main learning areas in 8000-250. This area focused on developing an understanding of the individual skill and capabilities that are required for team leaders. It includes the ability to lead, the ability to develop and the ability to improve the teams for performance. The unit also points to the need to collect, analyse and utilise feedback from the team leaders hence providing multidimensional development.

Wrap Up

At the end of the unit, the assessment is conducted using a written assessment. The learner is required to provide responses to ILM Level 2 8000-250 questions which are provided. In the responses, they should show their understanding of the content as well as awareness of the role that this information plays in shaping their performance within the workplace.