YOUR LEADERSHIP TEAM ISN’T A TEAM. AND YOU NEED ONE.
By Nina Segal
The Situation
Many well-intentioned leaders either include too many people in their decision making process or too few.
Trying to be overly consultative sometimes results in an over-reliance on monthly large team meetings or a yearly huge retreat as a way to check in and involve people in, say, giving input to a country program annual work plan.
While such meetings are ‘meant’ to be inclusive,’ the reality is that they don’t accomplish much, and often raise expectations that are never realized. This leaves both the leader and the team more siloed and less proactive in decision making.
One recent example of this occurred when a team leader asked us to facilitate a discussion to hear everyone’s voices around how to adapt to a workplace suddenly redefined by virtual collaboration. He ended the conversation by sharing his views on remote working; it would have likely been an opportune time for him to take time to summarize and acknowledge what he heard.
With no plan yet in place to carry ideas forward, expectations were raised, but without a team with a specific mandate to take it forward, the office may well be wondering why they had just spent several hours in a facilitated dialogue.
The Approach: Team Design
At the root of the problem is what we call “leadership team design.” That is: It is important to take a step back and explicitly consider the design of the team, not the dynamics of the team. Do we have a compelling purpose? Do we have the right people? Do we have a sound structure — team size, collective accountability, clear roles?
Many teams we work with realize, through our work with them, that an actual leadership team does not really exist. An example of such a need arose in a recent all staff retreat KITE facilitated for a new global campaign. The dynamic leader was flying around the world raising money and strengthening partnerships, and as a result, the internal management of the team suffered.
Often, the larger team waited for his blessing or input on many key management decisions were either delayed or made without sufficient buy-in among staff. This is not uncommon, and the reality is that leaders are often caught between two huge mandates: external visibility necessary for partnership development and fundraising and the more internal, strategic and personnel management. Both often fall on the shoulders of a powerful leader. And sadly, one of them is generally neglected. In most cases, it is usually the internal management that suffers.
What are the signs of such failure? Silos, redundant work, lack of follow through on large strategic visioning because nobody has time to look across matrices, and of course, low morale. Retreats and large group meetings might allow everyone to provide fleeting input, but the good morale they generate are fleeting.
This was the case with the campaign described above.
Despite the best intention, it became clear that the leadership team needed to be explicitly designed to address strategic internal management issues that involved cross-collaboration.
Designing the leadership team means first deciding who will be on the team. The WORK TO BE DONE determines who needs to be on the team. Leadership teams should not be too large or too small; research indicates approximately six to eight people as the ideal size (cite). Further, in this example, we worked with the leader to identify who headed the most important sections within the organization, who was motivated to cross collaborate, and what specific work needed to be accomplished by a ‘team.’
The Impact
If you find your leadership team siloed and would like to see more proactive, collective accountability, consider a redesign of your team. Once our team development specialist helped to clarify the necessary conditions around interdependent work, the team began to work differently, deepening both relationships and team effectiveness to raise awareness of their campaign with donors and in the media.
