This paper focuses on the control of a team of agents designated either as leaders or followers and exchanging information over a directed communication network. The goal is to drive each follower to a target position that depends on its neighbors. To this purpose, we propose a decentralized control scheme based on sliding–mode techniques and study the position error propagation within the network using the notion of Input–to–State Stability (ISS). In particular, we derive sufficient conditions on the control parameters for guaranteeing that the error dynamics is ISS with respect to the leaders’ velocities. Moreover, we show that, under suitable assumptions, the sliding–mode part of the control law is capable of steering the position errors to zero in finite time. The theoretical results are backed up by numerical simulations.