Beyond the Clichés: Leadership Teams and Complexity in Action

Another HBR article, another cliché…

OK, this heading is deliberately provocative, but it touches on a typical bug bear of mine: the gross simplification of what human organisations are. Let’s explore what I mean.

A fairly recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, *Teamwork at the Top* (Sep/Oct 2024), attempts to distil the essence of effective leadership teams into five behavioural traits: direction, discipline, drive, dynamism, and collaboration. While the article presents a structured approach, it ultimately reads like another corporate platitude—another formulaic prescription that, again, ignores the messy, complex reality of human interactions in organisations. However tempting the assumption is to create “the ten steps to…”, “the seven levers of…” or “the five behavioural traits for…”, leadership teams are not machines that can be fine-tuned by applying a standard, HBR-fuelled checklist; they are social networks governed by relationships, history, power, and the inherently unpredictable nature of human dynamics.

To go beyond these clichés, we need a framework that acknowledges complexity rather than trying to tame it. People who know me, know very well that I believe that the late Ralph Stacey’s Complex Responsive Processes of Relatingperspective provides such a model. Unlike conventional management theories that assume organisations can be directed and controlled like well-oiled machines, Stacey argues that organisations are networks of ongoing interactions where meaning, power, and identity are constantly being negotiated.

Leadership, in this view, is not about applying a formula but about participating in the emergence of patterns that shape the organisation’s trajectory.

The Predictable Clichés of Leadership Teams

Before exploring an alternative approach, let’s briefly summarise the HBR article, that was also referred to in an HBR LinkedIn post of October last year (their 'Tip of the week'). The authors identify five key traits of highly effective leadership teams:

1. Direction – Teams must align on strategic priorities and exhibit public commitment to them.
2. Discipline – Effective teams set clear roles, manage meetings efficiently, and establish structured decision-making processes.
3. Drive – They embrace resilience and proactively address challenges with a long-term focus.
4. Dynamism – They adapt to change, foster innovation, and learn from failures.
5. Collaboration – High-performing teams create psychological safety, encourage diverse viewpoints, and develop trust.

The article argues that leadership teams must make a sustained investment in these behaviours, conduct regular self-assessments, and embed new ways of working into their routines.

While this model appears reasonable, it assumes that leadership effectiveness is a matter of adopting best practices1. It’s also mindlessly boring in its detachment from the real world. The reality is much more nuanced: leadership teams are constantly dealing with ambiguity, conflicting interests, and the need to make sense of an inherently unpredictable world. This is where Stacey’s framework provides a much more realistic lens, also because it has been derived, bottom up, from studying human interaction, rather than some idealised ‘outsider looking in view’ that most business process-based organisational models have been following since the 80s.

For a record on how my own view of organisations has evolved over time, see the article ‘How my evolving way of seeing organisations changed my business change practice’, which also gives a perspective on other ways of seeing organisations.

A Complexity-Based View of Leadership

Ralph Stacey’s approach rejects the idea that organisations can be steered through rational planning alone. Instead, he views them as ongoing conversations and interactions where people make sense of their work through experience, negotiation, and adaptation. In this model, leadership is not about imposing order but about drawing attention to what is important in ways that resonate with people’s lived experience.

Applying this to leadership teams means accepting that:

• Conflict and disagreement are not dysfunctions but necessary components of collective sense-making.
• Strategy does not emerge from alignment2 around fixed objectives but through continuous negotiation and adjustment.
• Power dynamics shape how decisions are made and whose voices are heard in a team.
• Leadership is not about applying a set of behaviours but about shaping the conditions for new patterns of interaction to emerge.

Rather than assuming that leadership teams simply need to develop discipline or collaboration, we should ask:

What tensions exist in this team? What patterns of interaction dominate, and what alternative possibilities could emerge?

Leadership as Attention-Shaping

If we accept that leadership is not about enforcing best practices but about shaping patterns of interaction, then a leadership intervention is not about telling teams to be more disciplined or collaborative. Instead, it is about drawing attention to the most relevant issues and framing them in ways that help teams move forward.

For example, consider a leadership team struggling with trust and transparency. The conventional approach would be to conduct a team-building exercise or set up new governance structures. A complexity-based approach, however, would ask:

• What conversations are already happening that reflect concerns about trust?
• Where do people feel heard, and where do they feel excluded?
• How can we amplify the discussions that matter, rather than imposing new rules from the top?

By focusing on these questions, leadership interventions can shift from rigid solutions to dynamic participation in the reality of the organisation.

Reframing the Five Traits Through Complexity

People like me, with a background in complexity science applied to human interactions, love paradoxes. I am introducing one here. We cannot stipulate “the five traits of…”, I wrote earlier, so let’s -paradoxically- try to do that anyway! So, if we take up the baton and revisit the five traits from the HBR article through the lens of complexity, they take on a different meaning.

.1. Direction as Emergence

Instead of "setting" direction, leadership teams should continuously engage in conversations that allow direction to emerge from shared experiences and challenges.

Consider how Japanese engineering firm Tsuneishi Shipbuilding developed its future strategy through an evolving series of open-ended discussions, rather than top-down directives.

2. Discipline as Adaptive Structuring

Discipline is not about rigid routines but about creating structures that allow flexibility. Meetings should be spaces for productive tension rather than procedural checklists.

Swedish outdoor brand Fj?llr?ven empowers its leadership team to redefine agendas dynamically, allowing key issues to be addressed as they arise.

3. Drive as Engaging with Discomfort

Drive is not just about resilience; it is about being willing to engage with uncomfortable truths rather than seeking easy solutions.

When the Danish renewable energy company ?rsted shifted from fossil fuels to green energy, its leadership had to openly confront the realities of industry resistance and internal uncertainty.

4. Dynamism as Improvisation

- Dynamism should not be framed as "acting fast" but as the ability to improvise within constraints. The best teams are those that can navigate complexity without seeking premature certainty.

An example is the way Kenyan mobile money provider M-Pesa rapidly iterated its strategy based on user feedback rather than relying on pre-set plans.

5. Collaboration as Generative Conflict

Effective teams do not just "collaborate"; they embrace conflict as a source of new possibilities. Psychological safety is not about avoiding difficult conversations but about making them productive.

Brazilian aerospace firm Embraer fosters constructive friction by ensuring cross-functional teams challenge assumptions before launching new aircraft designs. This seems to be the polar opposite of what was happening in Boeing that caused the wide-spread quality issues.

Leading in the Real World

The real challenge for leadership teams is not to apply a fixed set of behaviours but to stay engaged with the complexities of their own work. This requires:

• Curiosity over certainty – Instead of assuming alignment, leadership teams should remain open to new perspectives and contradictions.
• Conversations over structures – Rather than designing perfect processes, they should focus on fostering ongoing, meaningful dialogue.
• Resonance over compliance – Leadership messages should not be corporate speak but should connect with the lived experience of employees.

Conclusion: Moving Beyond Best Practices

The HBR article provides a useful summary of conventional wisdom on leadership teams, but its predictability is its weakness. It assumes that effectiveness is a matter of adopting certain traits, rather than engaging with the complex, messy, and often contradictory reality of leadership teams.

By embracing a complexity-based perspective, business leaders can move beyond generic best practices and instead focus on **shaping attention, engaging in real conversations, and allowing new patterns of leadership to emerge.** In doing so, they will not only be more effective but also more attuned to the realities of organisational life—where success is not about ticking off a list of traits but about navigating complexity with skill, adaptability, and awareness.

“If leadership were as simple as a five-step guide, we'd all be billionaires running utopian enterprises. Instead, most leaders are just caffeine-fuelled chaos managers winging it with conviction."

1

<start of rant> ‘Best Practice’ is one of the most abused -and by extension the most meaningless - words in the business world. It is also utterly lazy. If I can just adopt what worked for others, carefully rephrased for me by an expensive consultant, it avoids me from having to do the hard work to figure out what is right for me, myself. <end of rant>

2

Without dwelling on it here, try to see how the meaning of a sentence changes if we abandon the (inherently linear) word ‘alignment’ and introduce the much more organic term ‘coherence’.