What is Leadership About - The Task, The Team Or The Individual?

Get a group of leaders together, as I often do, and ask them about their priorities in leading teams to successful achievement and you will get a number of different answers. Some will prioritise the task in hand and assume that everything will fall into place. For others it is about pulling together the right team with the right blend of people in it and for yet others, it will be about developing the individuals within the team. So, with so much disagreement on the topic, who is right?

Actually, they. all are, or at least each of the views is partly right. Good leaders concentrate on all three areas – the task, the team and the individual. You may even have come across the original work that led to this conclusion. It was by John Adair, who later of the Industrial Society and the University of Surrey, and he called it Action-Centred Leadership. He represented it as three circles which all intersected (and which he sensibly trade marked). He saw the leader as sitting at the intersection of all three elements. I do nott intend to make this an article on Adair’s theory – there is plenty of material on that generally on the internet - just Google ‘John Adair’.

The theory chimes with my own experience of building teams to complete tasks and it that that I want to talk about. In my career, I have been involved in many areas, one business is retail, a business that depends on the individuals (often the lowest paid in the organisation) who meet the customers directly and on a daily basis. They are part of teams that may be responsible for a part of a department store or the complete chain...store. Each team has a number of tasks, not least that of achieving customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers return and spend money with the retailer. A retail manager who leads a team to achieve that goal has to consider all three elements. If the store does not have the right stock and the means of displaying it, or if it is not clean, warm and welcoming, customers will not return. There has to be a team responsibility to manage stock and to ensure that it is merchandised on to the floor at appropriate times.

The better the team works together, the better the experience the customer gets and the more likely they are to feel welcomed in the store. The overall ambience of a store is something you may be able to detect within minutes of arriving. Whether you notice the atmosphere consciously or not, it will influence you. It will be positive, negative or just neutral and it will affect your state of mind and your feelings towards continuing to purchase or moving on to the next store. So that’s team and task. The role of the individual is the one you may recognise most readily. We have all experienced the good and the bad of customer service at some point in our lives.

Whether it is someone having a bad day and simply ignoring or dismissing your needs, or someone who goes out of their way to find that item you’ve been searching for, or who takes the time to talk to you and understand your requirements properly, their attitude and approach make a significant difference to your response to that store, to the company and to their brand. So the best store in the world will fail if the ...staff they employ give a poor or offhand service to their customers, or if the store is simply untidy and unwelcoming or if it has the wrong stock or is badly merchandised. Retail leadership is as much about detail as it is about strategy. The top retail leaders spend as much time as they can in their stores and getting close to their staff and customers. Your business may not be retail but the same need for detail and for the three pronged approach to leadership that John Adair developed, is probably just as true. There are three balls in the air – dare you drop any of them?

“`You` Do Not Build a Business – You Build People – Then People Build The Business for Success for All the People”

-????????? Colin Thompson

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