Within the last few months, I have gotten the opportunity to move twice, once into a storage unit and then out of the storage unit when I purchased a more permeant place. Both times I used the same moving service, Two Men and a Truck, but each time I had a very difference experience.
The first time with the service, the team was amazing. The team leader walked into the place with a positive attitude and made the task seem simple for the team and then quickly assigned roles to different members of his team and they completed the entire move in less time than estimated. The team worked hard understanding what their role was and even with a little bit of competition while having fun. The team had innovated and had brought a couple extra tools they had found make moves easier to do and helped keep their truck clean.
The second time the leader came in and just started to work. The team would stand, frequently vaping, around the leader if their was nothing for them to do waiting for the group to move and have work that required the whole team. This second team took more time to load the storage unit into the truck than the first team had taken to load my entire two story apartment into the truck and almost three times longer that the first team had taken to load the storage unit. The team did not have any tools with them to make the move easier and did not maintain a clean truck, making it easy for them to have missed items in the truck. Only when it started to reach the end of their day did the team really start to put in effort to get the job done and still not in an efficient way by assigned roles, but just in having each person working separately instead of moving in one group.
These two example really highlight the difference that an effective team leader can have on the operation of a team.