Leadership Teams vs. Teams of Leaders
It's more common to see strong leaders of teams than strong leadership teams. Photo by Leon on Unsplash
The case for high performing leadership teams is strong. Across industries, global consulting firm McKinsey have found that firms had 1.9 times increased likelihood of having above-median financial performance when the top team is “working together toward a common vision”. This is a compelling competitive advantage.
Working as a leadership team, however, is notoriously difficult to achieve. Research by Richard Hackman, Ruth Wageman and others has found that only 21% of leadership teams are high performing and 42% perform poorly. What is more likely than a high performing leadership team is what team coaching researchers often refer to as a pseudo team - where the team is called such by themselves or others but fails to work in a cohesive way towards a shared objective.
In other words, rather than a leadership team (working interdependently with each other) it's more likely that these 'teams' in fact are a group of leaders (working independently from each other).
This is more than a semantic distinction for coaches like me to theorise about. Comparing the two approaches (leadership team vs. a group of leaders), there are significant differences in how a leadership team operates that provide improved performance, resilience and engagement. It is also something that doesn't happen without effort. A fundamental reason that leadership teams fail to deliver on their promise is that they are comprised of hard-working, talented, dedicated leaders of independent teams – who don’t function as an interdependent and collaborative team.
What is required is a deliberate and intentional focus on leadership teams and not just individual leaders.
Investing in high performing leadership teams is a point of leverage worthy of consideration for organisations. It develops leaders who are better able to operate in complexity, teams that are better able to collaborate and ultimately provide organisations with a sustainable competitive advantage.
Here are a couple of questions for you to consider this week:
Are you part of a leadership team or a team of leaders?
What would it take for you to start or improve how you work together as a team?