First, “People care which team they’re on. Because that’s where work actually happens.” This gem of an insight comes from Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019).
As I see it, the goal in 2022 is to make all teams function better. During the pandemic, many teams turned into single leader work groups which is not a bad thing but it can be a limiting thing as we move forward, because the positional leader becomes the hub to solve all problems. And he or she never has enough time to do this within a VUCA environment. Furthermore, during 2020 and 2021, some teams and single work groups turned into nothing more than work groups, where people were more concerned about personal achievement than collective results.
If we seek to create high-performing teams with great internal and external, collaborative behaviors, then a team leader must role model this kind of behavior. I believe the precursor to role modeling collaborative behavior happens when the team leader pays attention to the emotional reality within a team and takes care of it as much as they focus on the work that needs to get done by the team.
As Daniel Goleman wrote in his article called “Leading Resonant Teams” in the summer 2002 issue of Leader to Leader magazine: “There are four aspects of emotional intelligence: emotional self-awareness, emotional self-management, awareness of others’ emotions - - or empathy - - and managing relationships with others. The leader needs to help the team become adept in each of these aspects of emotional intelligence. And to do this, the leader has to establish a set of ground rules for the way we work together, both by example in her behavior and by commenting on the behavior of others and helping people do better. In other words, the leader needs to help the team become more self-aware, which is the core aspect of emotional intelligence…. That self-awareness is a prerequisite for the team’s ability to manage its own emotions, to deal with issues rather than burying them.”
One element of doing this work is that the team leader must be able to change their leadership style over time, notes Linda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson in their excellent articled called “8 Ways to Build Collaborative Teams” in the November 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The three leadership styles are the following: task-oriented, goal oriented, and relationship building/maintaining.
When helping leaders and managers in 2022 and beyond, we need to dive into the third leadership style in greater depth, namely relationship building/maintaining. Some teams focus internally on the relationships within the team and this is a good beginning. Still, we need to help team members and the team as a whole spend more time in dialogue. As Goleman explained in the aforementioned article, “You can’t inspire people without understanding their perspectives, their hopes and dreams.” And this is a very different level of team dialogue given most teams only focus on tasks, goals and problems to be solved.
In particular, I don’t think we are helping team leaders with their ability to create this level of dialogue and to coach them before, during and after such a time period. As Goleman continues, “… many managers are inept at using the coaching style. Too often, they think they’re coaching when they are actually micromanaging. Good coaches ask themselves, is this about my issues or theirs?”
Furthermore, I don’t think we are aware of external team relationship building. High performing teams do internal team relationship building and maintaining on a regular basis. They also focus on the team’s relationship with the organization as a whole. This is not individual relationship building, but team to team relationship building. As Goleman notes, “some teams can be oblivious to that fact; all they see is the universe within the team, not how the team relates beyond to the larger web in the organization.” For leaders and manager to be successful during the next two years, this is critical step in their professional development.
This week, reflect on the above and ask yourself: What team relationships do I need to improve? Then, start doing the work.
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