Is a Team Lead Position Worth It? (Free Assessment Tool)

Are you considering a future career in your organization, or maybe you have already been offered a position as a team lead? Are you trying to figure out if it’s worth it or not?

A team lead position is worth it if you believe it’s important to impact decisions, increase your salary, and boost your CV. Being a team lead is most likely not worth it if you are unwilling to bear the cost of Increased stress, taking responsibility for failures, and having to fire your friends.

Today I want to share with you the summary of my experiences as a team leader, as well as team leads from well-known locations such as Walmart.

What Is a Team Leader or Team Lead?

A team leader is responsible for completing tasks, taking care of their employees, and communicating the organization’s vision and goals to each individual on the team. The team leaders usually have a more intimate connection with their teammates than, let’s say, upper management.

Benefits

Being a team leader definitely has some serious benefits to it. Most of them, I would say, are on an internal level, but some are also external such as money and an improved resume. Let’s have a look at what we got.

Money

Team leaders earn a national average salary in the US Of $52,973 per year, according to indeed.com. Of course, depending on your experience, industry, and employer, this will vary greatly.

Improved CV

having been a successful team leader means that you can organize, prioritize and fulfill organizational goals; these skills are useful whether or not you are a leader. Being a team leader forces you to improve your self-awareness and, therefore also, your self-management skills, two skills that are vital for any good employee or a good friend for that matter.

Sense of Fulfillment

For me, one of the most significant rewards of being a team leader is when the unit archives something meaningful, and you can see your teammates thrive, improve and become better versions of themselves.

You might think that routine work is insignificant and has no greater impact on the essential things in life. I think this is wrong; every leader can profoundly impact their teammates. Every day is an opportunity for you to share values and life experiences they can implement to improve their lives.

Impact Decisions

No matter what you think is important, the higher the organizational ladder you claim, the more ability you will have to change things according to what you believe is good. You might think that upper management doesn’t understand what it is like to do the work on the floor.

This gives you a couple of options: you can try to impact management from where you are, or you can try to get to where they are and make the decision yourself.

Costs

Increased Stress

While researching this article, I encountered many people who mentioned stress as their number one motivator for not taking another job as a team leader. Many team leaders say they get tasked with problems that cannot be solved with the resources they have been given; this is what we at Sancus Leadership call the impossible task, something you should never delegate to your subordinates.

It’s not working and it’s not worth the stress and toll it’s taken

Anonymous Walmart Team Leader #1

Take Responsibility for Failures

A good leader always assumes extreme ownership of task completion; whatever happens to the team, for good or bad, you will be the one responsible. This is mentally very tough for unprepared leaders; you will be struggling if you do not have adequate training before entering a role like this. That is why we train leaders here at Sancus Leadership; we want new managers to not only complete tasks but to have a loyal following.

If you want money an can handle stress with meeting unreasonable expectations, go for it, it’s what I do overnight. Turning dumpster fires of a night into decently smoldering husks by morning.

Anonymous Walmart Team Leader #2

Enforcing the rules is another. It comes down to you enforce them all or let them slide.. Then who do you let slide?

Former Team Leader at Honeywell Aerospace

Having To Fire Your Friends

one of the worst parts of being a team leader is that one day, you might be faced with firing someone that you really like; if you have been on the team with someone for multiple years, many of us feel like we have become family in some sense. Being a leader often means you’ll have to make some tough decisions, and this is probably one of the toughest.

Firing someone should never be taken lightheartedly since it will most likely impact their life negatively, at least in the short term, and it will most definitely affect your friendship. My philosophy is that firing someone is the final solution we have tried all other reasonable measures. And if you communicate this clearly over a long enough period of time, most people will understand the reason the reasoning behind it.

Is a Team Lead Position For You?

The following is a simple tool you can use to better understand whether a team lead position will be beneficial or not. This is a subjective assessment, and it should be since no one other than you will truly know.

Go through each row and assign a value of low, medium, high, or vital. Select a value based on how important these are in your life, and how well they align with your intrinsic motivations and character.

If you get less than 6 points, then I would not recommend you to pursue a leadership career right now.

If you get between 7 and 14 points, I think you should seriously consider whether or not this is something you want to pursue.

If you reach more than 15 points, I think you should definitely look into becoming a team leader.