Teams at the Top

FROM: Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith DATE: Spring 1994 Never has the level of performance expected of the small group of managers at the top of large organizations been higher. Today's challenges demand not only great personal effort, but also first-class collective leadership. Never, therefore, has the reality at most companies, including yours, been more troubling. Very few so-called "teams at the top" really work. Even fewer are real teams. Elsewhere in these organizations, as you well know, plenty of teams do work. Self-managing -- that is, boss-less, not leaderless -- teams are enabling companies of all sizes to increase productivity, quality, and bottom-line results. Cross-functional teams are helping them to remove internal structural barriers, break down functional "silos," and ratchet up innovation, speed of response, and service performance. Front-line sales teams are prompting them to combine product/service skills with account development sensitivity in ways that improve both customer loyalty and profit margins. Why this huge difference in experience? It cannot be simple caution on your part. You have, certainly, seen enough large-scale team efforts fail to be immune to the faddish belief that teams provide a sure-fire panacea for all corporate ills. But you have seen many local -- and quite valuable -- successes as well. The explanation must lie elsewhere. All or nothing In our research for The Wisdom of Teams, as in our work with senior executives both then and since, we have often been struck by the many assumptions these leaders make about the relevance of team performance to their own immediate circumstances. (*) Although rarely explicit and almost never discussed, their beliefs about the purpose, membership, end products, role mix, leadership, and -- most important -- sustainability of teams at the top show great consistency. But it is a consistency of error. In fact, it is precisely such assumptions -- plausible and cogent, but wrong -- that disincline these groups of managers to seek team performance levels for themselves in the first place. Or, even if they do seek them, that so often bring their efforts to grief. Misleading assumptions Careers spent in traditional "command and control" environments can easily lead managers to assume, for example, that: * the animating purpose or mission of any team at the top is -- and should be -- virtually indistinguishable from the mission of the company as a whole; * all of a CEO's "direct reports" must be members of the team; * since what the team does is review, discuss, decide, inform, and delegate, the true end products of its work are guidelines and standards for others; * what each member does as part of the team should be consistent with his or her organizational position and role; and * formal team leadership, to be credible, must be exercised by the most senior member -- that is, by the CEO. However commonsensical at first glance, these points of view inevitably lead managers to operate, de facto, as a working group and not as a real team. They may say of themselves that that they are -- or are genuinely trying to be -- a team. They may honestly believe that is what they are doing. They may even be confident that they are doing it successfully. But they are not. Indeed, they cannot be -- not if their actions and attitudes are shaped by any one or more of these assumptions. When a group of people has no separate and distinct purpose as a group, when its membership is defined not by relevant skill but by official position, when it generates no joint work product, and when its leadership is determined by external hierarchy instead of internal need -- such a group is not a real team. This is not mere semantics. A team, by our definition, is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. …