The idea of “team” has such a positive association that we find it everywhere in organizations today. It brings to mind an energized group, helping and supporting each other as they work together towards an important goal.
But most “teams” are not actually teams in that sense – they are simply groups of people who all report to the same leader.
That’s not a problem…
Unless they actually do need to work together towards an important goal.
What is a team?
The baseline for being a real team is having a common goal and clear interdependencies – they rely on each other to reach the goal.
But to be a high-performing team, they also need a deep sense of commitment to the goal, and an interpersonal dynamic that enables transparency, dissent, conflict and intelligent failure. All of which leads to mutual trust and ultimately strong feelings of pride when they succeed together in doing something meaningful.
High-performing Leadership Teams
This holds for any team, but what about leadership teams? Leaders are different from other kinds of team members because their work is to lead, or influence others towards a meaningful goal.
And leadership team members have two responsibilities: (1) leading their own function and (2) collaborating with their peers to create success for the organization. But their day-to-day function demands usually leave them with little time to focus beyond that. Their work with peers becomes more of an afterthought.
A high-performing leadership team is one where the members balance their own functional responsibilities with organizational leadership. Usually, the functional needs are more concrete, with clear performance metrics like revenue, profit, throughput, customer satisfaction, etc. And the collective, organizational work of a leadership team can be harder to define.
What is the work of a leadership team?
The challenge is to balance those concrete, functional outcomes with the collective organizational work of a leadership team:
- Creating alignment throughout the organization on what matters
- Building the organizational capability required to execute
- Empowering people to create meaningful results, and holding them accountable
The potential for impact when a team of leaders works well together is practically unbounded. High-performing leadership teams coach each other and collaborate to drive stakeholder impact in multiples of what they could achieve individually.
What kind of team do you belong to?