Leadership is changing from competitive to cooperative. Leaders were once singular heroes. The singular hero is no longer enough to accomplish the size of tasks ahead. Now we have ensemble leadership. As we move from soloists to ensemble players, to cover the multiple roles, we must understand the principles that allow for top performance in a team.
A shared leadership model or complementary responsibility model is replacing the single hero model (Kets de Vries, 2007). This impacts the coaching approach, changing it from adjusting individual performance to identifying and monitoring group processes.
However, functional teams don’t just happen, says J. R. Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University leading expert on teams. Individuals in teams need to know their strengths, weaknesses, and have protocols for how to work together. The important thing is to exploit each one’s strengths and allow them to get help in the areas where they are not so great.
In his book Leading Teams, Hackman recommends 5 steps to supporting and creating functional leadership teams:
1. Teams must be real and clearly defined. People have to know who is on the team and who is not.
2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together.
3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context – including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system – must facilitate teamwork.
5. Teams need expert coaching. Rather than focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork, coaches should coach teams as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project. (Coutu & Beschloss, 2009, p. 103)
According to Hackman: “[T]he first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of conduct will be expected and enforced.” (Coutu & Beschloss, 2009, pp. 102-103)
Hackman said that each team needs clear role and task definition, as well as an ongoing sense of freedom to improvise.
The team needs to feel okay about new ideas that arise, even ones that seem to question their present methods.
Teams that try to sustain harmony at all costs may reward only those who appear to be “team players.” By refusing to reward, or even ostracizing, those who question where they are going and how they are doing it, these teams may be losing out. Creative dispute can save a project.
Hackman, of Harvard, said, “There’s no one right style for leading a team…. The best team leaders are like jazz players, improvising constantly as they go along.”
Hackman says that one of the greatest detriments to a team is to lose sight of the objectives and be at a loss as how to communicate and check along the way. The next is to lose a sense of individual identity in the group: knowing who is strong at what.
According to Hackman, the key junctures to bring in a group or team coach are: at the beginning, to set a tone and communications standards and to identify the task; the middle, to review how this is going as a process, and to monitor the focus on the task; and the end, to review how it went and release the team from the task so that they can move on to the next ones. The complete team will be able to monitor its progress through these transitions.
Both experts say that teams require outside resources and support to be free to improvise, to develop their communications, to freely dispute and clash, and to get the appropriate range of leadership talent acknowledgement suited to the objectives. They need framework, structure and monitoring.
A well appointed team which understands its strengths and can identify its roles is definitely one step ahead of the game.
Reference
Coutu, D., & Beschloss, M. (2009). Why Teams DON’T Work. Harvard Business Review, 87(5), 98-105.
Kets de Vries, M. (1994). The leadership mystique. Academy of Management Executive, 8(3), 73-89.
Kets de Vries, M. (2004). Organizations on the couch: A clinical perspective on organizational dynamics. European Management Journal, 22(2), 183-200.
Kets de Vries, M. (2005). Leadership group coaching in action: The Zen of creating high performance teams. Academy of Management Executive, 19(1), 61-76.
Kets de Vries, M. (2005). The dangers of feeling like a fake. Harvard Business Review, 83(9),108-116.
Kets de Vries, M. (2007). Decoding the team conundrum: The eight roles executives play. Organizational Dynamics, 36(1), 28–44.
The Wellman Method supports leadership development
