The Leadership of Teams: How to Develop and Inspire High-performance Teamwork

THE LEADERSHIP

OF TEAMS

THE LEADERSHIP

OF TEAMS

How to develop and inspire

high-performance teamwork

MIKE BRENT AND

FIONA ELSA DENT

Bloomsbury Business

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

To our families

CONTENTS

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Teams – what and why!

2 Leadership and teams

3 The stages of team development

4 Team roles

5 Types of teams

6 Qualities and characteristics for effective team leaders and members

7 Building trust

8 Engaging the team

9 The emotional element

10 Teams and accountability

11 Influencing the team

12 Facilitating the team

13 Coaching the team

14 Managing challenging behaviour

15 Dealing with conflict

16 Change in teams

17 Dealing with politics in teams

18 Derailment

And finally, the future of teams

References and Booklist

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael Brent is Professor of Practice and Adjunct Faculty at Ashridge Executive Education, Hult International Business School, one of the leading business schools in Europe. He specializes in leadership, team-building, influencing, coaching, cross-cultural management, leading change and personal development. He now also runs his own coaching, training and consultancy company and has a particular interest in working with management teams.

He has co-authored four other books on leadership with Fiona.

Mike believes the key aspects of leadership are self-awareness, and skill and flexibility in responding to others. Managers and leaders must operate in areas where there are many dilemmas and ‘wicked’ problems, and therefore must develop the ability of not knowing to go with their ability to make decisions.

Mike holds both British and French nationalities and is bilingual.

Fiona Elsa Dent is a Management Trainer, Leadership Coach and Professor of Practice at Ashridge Business School. Fiona now has a portfolio career having worked full-time for more than thirty-five years. She was a faculty member at Ashridge for twenty-four years and during her last ten years on the full-time staff she held a role on the management team as Director of Executive Education where she managed a faculty group and contributed to the strategic operation of the organization.

Fiona now enjoys a mixed portfolio of teaching, coaching, researching and writing. She still contributes to a variety of programmes at Ashridge and also works for a range of clients as a management trainer and coach. She enjoys researching and writing and since moving to a portfolio role has published three books in addition to this one: The Leaders Guide to Managing People, The Leaders Guide to Coaching and Mentoring, both with her co-author Mike Brent, and How to Thrive and Survive as a Working Woman: The Coach Yourself Toolkit with her co-author Viki Holton.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our appreciation to all the managers who have over the years attended our leadership development programmes and been able to tell their leadership and team stories. We also wish to thank those who actively contributed to our thought processes in writing this book.

Our thanks go to Ian Bell, Alan Gentle, Alex Davda, Hans Friberg, Helena Gaunt, Helen Bailey, Francoise Nash, Mike Stonor, Stuart Green, Peter Hawkins, Viki Holton, Sue Honore, Tom Powers, Dr Mark Lowther, Dame Carolyn McCall, Dr Mark McKergow, Dominic Mahoney, Nigel Melville, Carina Paine Schofield, Will Shorten, Tamsin Simmons, Rolf, Christoph, Simon, Pierluigi, Gery, Jane, Feisal and Laurent from the 1st Host Leadership Conference and to Tony (Spreaders) Spreadbury and his team at the England Rugby Football Union.

Special thanks to Sharon West and Mike Dell for their support.

Introduction

In our work we hear the words ‘teams’ and ‘teamwork’ constantly, and we were struck by the fact that very few people in teams ever reflect on what exactly a team is, how it works or how it could work even better. What exactly is a team? And do we always need teams to do the work? Is there a difference between a team and a group?

So we decided to explore the world of teams and find out what they are, if and when they are necessary, and what could be learned about both leading and participating in teams. We looked at the research, called on our own experience of leading and working both in and for teams, observed teams and interviewed team leaders and members from a variety of different fields, including the business world, the arts, sport, the military and medicine.

Where does the word ‘team’ come from?

The word ‘team’ derives from the old English and Norse word for ‘bridle’, and from that came the meaning of a set of animals, harnessed together, which would pull ploughs to till the land. From this definition comes the analogy of people involved in joint action. The concept of ‘team’ must be one of the most commonly used ideas in organizational life. However, we think that it is overused, in the sense that many so-called teams are not in fact real teams.

A research report by Deloitte University Press (2016) stated that ‘Businesses are reinventing themselves as networks of teams in order to keep pace with the challenges of a fluid unpredictable world.’

We believe that there is significant progress to be made in how teams work effectively, and that team leaders and team members can realize the full potential of effective teamwork. We hope that this book can contribute to this progress.

In our experience, working with many different types of teams across many businesses, organizations and countries, we have often found that the team leader had no specific training either in psychology or in team dynamics. They were often highly skilled individuals in their specific technical area, but lacking in the skills that would help them make the most of their teams’ potential. We specifically found it disheartening when the so-called team leader did not involve or engage all the members of the team, or when the leader ignored contributions, or worse still, dismissed ideas as being rubbish. It’s not enough just to have the title of team leader; we believe that there is a need for the leader to gain specific knowledge and training in order to unlock the team’s full potential.

In this book, we offer a practical and comprehensive review of teams and teamwork. We discuss why effective teamwork is so important and also examine many different aspects of teams, team leadership and team membership. Some of what we offer are reminders about some of the well-known theories and models – such as team roles, team processes and stages of team development. We discuss how to deal with issues such as trust, engagement, conflict, politics and change in the team. We also give ideas on tools and techniques for team success, such as how to coach, influence and facilitate teams. We highlight the dangers of team members derailing and how to avoid it. Finally, we look at the future of teams – where we believe that all team members, not just the team leader, should be able to have the skills to lead the team effectively.

We hope that in addition to refreshing your knowledge of teams and team working, you will find some useful new ideas, tips and techniques. The book is designed so that you can dip in and out of it, and we hope that it will help you to become an even more effective team leader and team member.

1

Teams – what and why!

T – Together

E – Everyone

A – Achieves

M – More

What is a team?

The usual definition of a team is, ‘A small group of people with complementary skills and a common purpose’ (Katzenbach and Smith 1993). Small, because too many people and a team will be ineffective. The accepted range for an effective number of people in a team tends to be between five and twelve people, although Wharton Business School professor Jennifer Mueller concludes that six is optimal. Although important, the number of people is not as important as the quality of the people and the type of leadership demonstrated within the team. We suggest that teams work best when they have members who have complementary skills and approaches. Having people with different skills and preferences will help to gain the maximum amount of diversity to achieve the team goals and success. For the team to achieve anything, it should also have discussed and agreed its common purpose. It’s actually quite amazing how many so-called teams exist which have not discussed the issue of complementarity or indeed defined any common purpose.

Researchers Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith made the useful distinction between working groups and teams. These are not the same thing and they have very different goals and objectives, need different skills and produce different results. Working groups, for example, share information, perspectives and insights. They place their focus on individual goals and accountabilities, and not on taking responsibility for results other than their own. Teams, however, will also focus on mutual accountability and responsibility. There are a number of other differences between working groups and teams. Teams, for example, have a specific team purpose as well as the more general organizational mission to follow. A group is likely to have a specific leader, whereas a team could have a nominated leader but is also able to share leadership roles.

The main thing to remember is that just because you call a group of people working together a team, that doesn’t magically make them into one. Until you work to develop specific team attributes, it will simply be a working group. That said, effective working groups can sometimes be more productive than ineffective teams. But at their best, real teams will outperform working groups.

Some organizations persist in calling a bunch of people who happen to do some work together a team. We often see this in so-called management teams, when we are asked to come in and help them because they are behaving in a dysfunctional manner or simply not working together effectively. To create an effective team takes time and effort – it simply will not happen by chance. In this book, we will describe many ways of making your group into a team, or making an ineffective team into a better one.

LESSON FROM BUSINESS

We interviewed a team member from an award-winning business development team. The team won an organizational award for ‘Client Focus’ and it is multifunctional, multicultural and multigenerational. It also contributes towards the success of a wider business team within the organization.

On the topic of what makes the team a team rather than simply a group of people, the team member in question attributed it to a range of things:

• Starting with the recruitment process – in which everyone is involved. The aim of this is to ensure that they all feel new people will fit with the culture of the team.

• On the whole, people in the team get along and all have a good sense of humour.

• The team structure is pretty flat and non-hierarchical, friendly and focused on business targets.

• Regular team meetings are an important feature of the team’s success. All team members are involved in all meetings. Each meeting has a different purpose:

Regular Monday morning meeting

Strategy meeting

Social lunches to celebrate success, welcome new joiners, etc.

Sales pushes, where all team members get onto the phone to try to get leads

Weekly pipeline meetings

• This regular whole team communication has significantly contributed to the team’s success and means that on the whole the team members are energetic, client-focused, responsive and committed to the client process.

He feels that a key feature of the team is its driven and go-getting nature.

Why are teams important?

Good teamwork can enhance the performance of any organization. As the well-known American football coach and businessman Vince Lombardi said, ‘Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work’. We have identified a range of reasons why we believe effective teams and teamwork are important for success in today’s organizational life; these are discussed below.

Our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world

We live in a so-called VUCA world, an acronym which was coined by the American military, meaning volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

• Volatile – The reality is we live in a turbulent world where situations are liable to change rapidly and unpredictably, often for the worse.

• Uncertain – The feeling of uncertainty is more pronounced than ever before, where it is less likely that future events can be predicted.

• Complex – Our world has become ever more multifaceted, which has led to increased difficulty in understanding.

• Ambiguous – Many of the issues we confront are capable of being understood in more than one way, and thus consensus is difficult to achieve and conflict becomes more likely.

It is therefore increasingly difficult for one person (no matter how brilliant or how high up the hierarchy) to have the answers to all the problems and dilemmas faced by our organizations.

Teams enable creativity and innovation

By their very nature teams are made up of different people with different personalities, perspectives, opinions, needs, etc. The key issue here is that this diversity must be leveraged in order for high performance, and true creativity and innovation to happen.

Dealing with ‘Wicked Problems’

Team leaders also now have to address what Professors Horst Rittel and Melvin Weber (1973) called ‘wicked problems’. Here ‘wicked’ doesn’t mean evil, but rather resistance to resolution. The definition of a ‘wicked’ problem is that solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong, but better or worse. In other words, there is no one single agreed right answer to the problem. More and more of the problems that leaders and teams face are of this kind, yet often the leader is expected to know the answer, when there is actually no answer – only options, ideas or possibilities. We cannot underestimate the pressure that leaders feel to find the answer, even when there is no single possible answer.

There are, of course, times when we still face less complex issues. These are issues which are fairly well known and where there is no uncertainty involved. These issues can be described as ‘puzzles’, and individuals can solve them, so when faced by puzzles team members can often act and decide alone. On the other hand, when faced with more complexity and less certainty, an issue can be described as either a complex problem that does have solutions, or as a dilemma that actually doesn’t have any one single solution. When faced with this type of problem, we need to work together in teams in order to leverage diversity, seek different opinions and challenges, and see how we can use the collective intelligence of the team to find the best possible solution.

When faced with even greater uncertainty – or dilemmas – we still need to use a team, and must expect divergence, challenge, creativity and honesty at this level. This will ensure that the best possible outcomes are reached. There are no simple solutions at this level of complexity, but there is a need for team members to be able to speak truthfully and to challenge each others’ thinking in order to fully explore the issue and be