A leader’s most important role.
A leader’s most important role is enabling the team to be successful. Building skills in how to create a high performing team is so fruitful because a successful team achieves more than what any individual could possibly imagine, and with that secret sauce ….one plus one really can add up to three. The magic comes from the milieu of interactions.
Covid-19 having juggernauted us all into working from home has proven people can be just as productive at home as they are in the office. For some, there still might be a preference to work in the office, but it clearly is a choice. Employers have been forced to trust their employees and believe they will “do the right thing” breaking the misaligned convention that presenteeism and physical supervision are required to drive outcomes. This lived experience of trusting employees has broken an age-old assumption embedded by the industrial revolution that incorrectly attributes attendance to effort. There will always be exceptions where trust is broken, but they are just that ‘exceptions to the rule’ and not the yardstick. The Covid experience reminds us of an early theory of motivation McGregor’s X/Y Theory (1960) where “Y” is a leader’s belief and trust in the individual’s noble intentions and “X” is mistrust and subsequent management and control in a more authoritarian manner. The “so what?” is - the future of work is an accepted combination of employees working in and out of the office. Employees on the whole can be trusted and therefore leaders must equip themselves in how they foster and harness the effectiveness of a virtual team.
Unwittingly what we are seeing develop is an industry around measuring productivity, a new attempt to control employees and substitute for the attendance quotient. Rather than concentrate on these lag indicators why not focus energy and attention on optimising how people can operate more effectively as a team in this virtual world?
How do you do this? By proactively building an individual’s or team’s resilience (McEwen, 2018) and building the literacy and skills in managing virtual teams (Clutterbuck & Hawkins, 2020). Both focus on creating sustainable high-performance outcomes.
Please refer to our Peoplemax Blog for previous articles relating to resilience click here .
This article outlines why focusing on the team unit and the leader’s ability to optimise virtual teaming can unlock amazing potential for your competitive advantage. A new way of working is here! It requires small but important adjustments. The trick is how you capitalise on it pragmatically, cost effectively and immediately and one solution is through team coaching.
Teams
Teams are the most common unit of all being, think family, community, or organisations. An organisation is a team of teams. A team consists of members that share a common purpose (Katzenbach, 1998), eight members is optimal (Clutterbuck & Hawkins, 2020). Teams are systems so they are both complex and adaptive requiring a leader to take a systemic view of how they operate. Simply, this is considering the multitude of factors that influence an outcome when diagnosing what is impacting performance. Hawkin’s (2018) model below is an intuitive way to look at team dynamics and assess what is working well and where you might want to focus effort. Notice that balancing both an inwards and outwards view of what the team is trying to achieve is a core attribute of success balancing not just function but form.
Hawkins (2018)
Virtual Team Effectiveness Research
Research shows virtual teams are less effective if you simply allow them to function as if they were operating in a normal environment (Govindarajan & Gupta, 2001). Similarly, just putting together a group of high potential individuals does not create a great team, in fact it can seriously undermine it (Edmondson, 2012). However, if you teach a leader ‘team literacy’ and then work with the leader to actively manage the team dynamics the team will perform so much better (Clutterbuck, 2020; Hawkins , 2018; Leary-Joyce & Line, 2018). A few key success criteria quickly emerge from working with a leader to help them appreciate and distribute their leadership to the team along with creating team processes to ensure the team’s effectiveness. For example, an awareness of style and strengths of the collective team can enhance the way they work together to achieve results.
Virtual Team Development
Always start with the end game in mind. Where are your team’s needs and what is important now? This quandary will support you choosing the starting point for an intervention. While you might be tempted to start with purpose and building alignment around this, so there is a shared ownership of the end game, if there is no psychological safety to have a robust conversation then most likely everyone will not feel comfortable to debate the ideas and ultimately achieve a shared view, and ownership of the end game. Equally, focusing on the internal dynamics and not balancing this with the ‘outside-in’ perspective can hinder innovation and result in a more operational focus for the team. Thorough systemic diagnosis of what is important for the team functioning is a first step to creating a platform for success. Teams evolve, they don’t “just happen”, they require time and attention where everything from the diagnosis to the roadmap and execution must be owned by the team which means involving team member’s contribution every step of the way. The leader must shift from hub and spoke to shared ownership (Clutterbuck & Hawkins, 2020) while making sure accountability is clear.
Team Coaching
More and more leaders are inviting team coaching into their natural routines to improve their virtual team performance. This often involves coaching the leader one-on-one and can include tools like team assessments, live coaching in real-time meetings, through to appreciation of individual and team strengths and weaknesses. Team coaches usually partner with the leader and work dynamically with an intact team for six to twelve months to achieve the goals they have set. In an ideal setting one coach would work with both the leader and the team to achieve their outcomes and another coach might work with individual team members one-on-one to maximise their potential and contribution. Focusing on Strategy, Process and Behaviours at both an Individual and Group level will assist the team to appreciate and manage most systemic permutations that occur which will result in optimising performance.
A well-functioning team is the only construct where creative synapses can give you a one plus one equals three result. To unleash that potential for a virtual team a leader needs to share their leadership position and be literate in what makes a team function optimally. This requires skill and is well worth the effort and investment in developing.
Stay safe
Tracey Gavegan
References
Clutterbuck, D (2020) Coaching the team at work: The definitive guide to team coaching, London, Routledge.
Clutterbuck, D & Hawkins, P (2020) Team Coaching. The Global Institute of Team Coaching Seminar for Certificate in Team Coaching, Lecture 1 : https://wbecs.com/gtci/gateway/
Edmondson, AC (2012) Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the knowledge Economy, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Govindarajan , V & Gupta, A (2001). Building an effective global business Team . MIT Sloan management review, Cambridge, Vol 42, 4, pp63-71.
Hawkins, P. (2017) Leadership Team Coaching. London: Kogan Page. pp 32-35
Katzenbach, JR (1998). Teams at the top, Harvard Business School Press
Leary-Joyce, J and Line, H (2018) Systemic Team Coaching, St Albans, Academy of Executive Coaching Press
McEwen , K (2018). Resilience at work: A framework for Coaching and Interventions. White paper www.workingwithresilience.com.au
McGregor, D (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York. McGraw- Hill.
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