Top teams - myths and realities
The “top team”! That small group of dedicated executives taking the organisation to some brave new world; sharing ideas, exchanging information and supporting one another in the company’s best interests – there’s no “I” in the top team just “we” & “us”!!
In Jim Collins terms the team is made up of those who “look through the window when it all goes well and in the mirror when it all goes wrong” and not vice-versa.
Is that really the case? Yes, I have come across some senior teams that do behave like that, but often the expression "top leadership team" is a misnomer for the groups that exist at the apex of many organisations. In many cases such groups are simply a conglomeration of senior management, who rarely come together (and when they do it is usually only to exchange information), who rarely collaborate, and who focus almost entirely on their own part of the organisation.
At best many senior teams operate as a “pseudo” team lacking the discipline and creativity of a real team, at second best they operate as a “single-leader working group” and at the worst as simply a collection of “heads of functions” who never really wanted to be part of a leadership team and who are more concerned by their functional responsibilities rather than cooperating to solve transversal organisational challenges.
At the very worst it is sometimes a collection of senior executives with huge egos vying for position and the limelight.
I use the definition of a “real team” from Katzenbach’s Wisdom of Teams:
“A real team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, objectives and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”
In Wisdom of Teams Katzenbach also identified six real team basics, which seem completely appropriate for senior teams:
- The team should be small enough in number to integrate work efforts effectively
- The team should have adequate levels of complementary skills in terms of functional skills, technical skills, problem solving skills and (possibly most importantly, but that’s only my opinion) interpersonal skills.
- The team needs a broader meaningful purpose that all team members aspire to
- The team should have a specific set of performance objectives agreed upon by all
- The team’s working approach needs to be clearly understood and commonly agreed upon
- Team members hold themselves both individually and mutually accountable for the team’s results
In another of his books, Teams at the Top, Katzenbach mentions at least two “litmus tests” for real teams:
- Clear collective work products dependent on the joint application of multi-person skills
- Shifting leadership roles to be filled by different people at different stages of the effort.
Senior executives often sing the praises of teamwork at lower levels, but when it comes to themselves, they often exhibit aloofness and blinkered perspectives.
So, is there a recipe for creating a top team?
No there’s no recipe but, in my opinion, there is one essential ingredient and some criteria which could help.
This is the essential ingredient:
Team members should have a real desire to be part of the team; a real desire to contribute to the company’s development and a real desire to be part of a collective responsibility for the entire company. The head of marketing and the head of engineering both have a collective responsibility for HR or IT policies; it’s not just the head of HR who decides on HR issues for the company and it’s not just the head of IT who decides on IT issues for the company.
I come across many top team members who are there simply because they have become “head” of their function; often a function that they have spent most of their life in and all they really want to do is manage their function – the idea of now having “trans-organisational” responsibilities and having to look at problems outside their domain of competence is not what they are looking for!
And here are some criteria for creating a successful top team:
- The team should have a name, even something as straight forward such as executive committee or policy group. Membership needs to be clearly conveyed, not to establish an elite, but to allow members to identify with the team and to understand that they are part of it.
- The team needs to take on real work. If the team only convenes to share information or to review other people’s work, there can be no sense of team commitment or energy. The senior team needs to roll up its sleeves and take on substantial tasks - tasks that deal with company-wide, market place challenges.
- The team needs to meet often enough to feel like a team. Once a month for half a day is usually sufficient (if team members are located around the world, quarterly meetings plus video conferencing can suffice). The team should have at least a couple of two-day meetings away from the office each year, at which difficult issues can be tackled in depth. In the process familiarity and trust will be reinforced.
- Team members should be given additional responsibilities, outside of their functional role, for company-wide endeavours. This will help to break down the “parochial” approach and develop senior executives with a company-wide perspective.
- Team members need to work on HOW they work together and not just on WHAT they do together. “The Apollo Syndrome”, (a team of highly capable individuals collectively, performing badly) is often the case with many top teams.
- The senior person (CEO, MD, President, etc.) must set the tone. He or she must convey and reinforce norms of openness and constructive candour in the team. An essential role is to ensure that disagreement and minority views are not penalised, and, above all, that healthy, sometimes heated, debate never becomes personal.
As it says in the McKinsey article, Building a forward-looking board, “Winning boards will be those that work in the spirit of continuous improvement at every meeting, while always keeping long-term strategies top of mind”.
If you have enjoyed reading this, you may like to take a look at some other articles & posts that I have written:
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