Being a team leader is a challenging job, especially during a global pandemic. Given we have little influence and control over external events, team leaders need to build and maintain a team that has the capacity to solve technical problems, adaptive challenges and crisis situations. The first step in this process is to define who is and who is not on the team, and why. As Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen in their article called “The Secrets of Great Teamwork,” (Harvard Business Review, June 2016) write, “… putting together a team involves some ruthless decisions about membership; not everyone who wants to be on the team should be included, and some individuals should be forced off.” As they continue, “… as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between team members that gets teams into trouble.”
The second step is to clearly define the purpose, the role and the direction of the team. As they explain, “… setting a direction is emotionally demanding because it always involves the exercise of authority, and that inevitably arouses angst and ambivalence - for both the person exercising it and the people on the receiving end.” Still, the work must be done.
The third step is to create and execute a team building and maintenance plan. As Haas and Mortensen point out, “The problem almost always is not that a team gets stale, but, rather, that it doesn’t have the chance to settle in.” As part of this process, team leaders need to remember the following: “There are many things individuals can do better on their own, and they should not be penalized for it…. The challenge for a leader, then, is to find a balance between individual autonomy and collective action.”
The fourth step is to engage in regular coaching of team leaders. In an interview with J. Richard Hackman by Diane Coutu called “Why Teams Don’t Work” (Harvard Business Review, May 2009), Hackman explains, “Each leader brings to the tasks his and her own strengths and weaknesses. Exploit the daylights out of the stuff you’re great at, and get help in the areas where you’re not so good…. What matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members. Instead what teams need to thrive are certain “enabling conditions.” When we coach team leaders, we need to help them figure what are the “enabling conditions” they need to create so the team can flourish.
Finally, we all need to read and think deeply about the following quote by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their excellent book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019): “… what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams. What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly that you make us feel you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.” Again, this is an area where we can coach team leaders and help them become better at doing these two important things.
The above five step process is a solid beginning given the problems and challenges before us now. Through disciplined action and regular coaching, we can assist team leaders and their teams to become better problem solvers. And given all that has happened this spring, we sure do need that to happen at a higher level.
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