I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what makes a good team leader. This thinking led to a lot of research and quite a bit of reflection. I thought about good leaders I’ve known on teams that I’ve been on and I thought about what a good leader looks like. A few commonalities began to emerge. Leadership roles within the team seem to naturally develop. Some people gravitate towards doing the organizational tasks of the team, while others tend towards more of the planning aspect. Some drift towards
Teams vary from highly competitive at one end of the spectrum to all-inclusive at the other end, with everything in between. Finding the right team for you is often a difficult process. Some paddlers find themselves wanting more of a competitive challenge, yet the club they belong to has more of a social focus. Other paddlers want to be on the race crew more often, yet their skill set isn’t developed enough and so they find themselves as a “spare” quite frequently. Some paddlers truly believe that they want to
