The Leadership We Need

Leadership is concerned with individuals, interactions, the big picture and only then (if at all) with processes and results

Do we need leadership for teams? If we get our teams to be self-organized then surely we don’t need leaders anymore, at least not official leaders. The answer I have found to this is: It depends on the teams and what they need at the moment. A few years ago, I made the mistake of thinking that informal leadership would be enough for our self-organized teams — it wasn’t. Not at the beginning at least. And since then I have learned a lot about what kind of leadership is needed and will always be needed, although where this leadership comes from is subject to change.

The perfect team doesn’t need leadership

If a team has all it needs, then it doesn’t need to be led. My assumption when we introduced self-organizing teams in my companies, was that the teams would have all they needed. The things a team needs in order to perform at its best can be grouped into three categories*:

• resources
• relationships
• direction

First of all, a team needs resources. Which means it has the right tools for the job and also that the required skills for the project are available (either through the team members themselves or easily accessible for the team). Furthermore, all the data and knowledge needed for the tasks must be available or attainable. And of course, a team needs to have enough time and adequate space and an energy or drive for creating the value.

Secondly, assuming the task at hand can’t be done by one person alone, the relationship with the other team members must be a good one.

Thirdly, a team needs to know its direction. This direction is leading somewhere. Whether we call it a goal, a vision, a purpose — in the end something of value is to be created and if the team knows what it should be, the members have a direction.

If a team has all of that, then it will find the best way to accomplish its goals, and produce its results. It will make the best decisions to get there and take care of each of its members. It doesn’t need a leader.

However, in the real world, it is extremely rare for a team to have all of that and if it does at some point, usually it doesn’t last for long.

That is what we need leadership for. Simply put: a leader’s task is to make sure that a team has all that it needs to perform the task and reach its goals; that the relationships between the team members are good and healthy; and that it knows what it is creating.

Whenever these needs are fulfilled, leadership can go take a break.

Individuals, interactions, big picture

But, of course, there is always something for a leader to do. There are connections to make with the individuals in the team in order to find out what is needed both for the task but also for personal growth.

And interactions are not static. Today they are great, tomorrow everybody is in a bad mood, the next day deadline pressure makes us forget that we are all dedicated and working toward the same goal. Everyday, there is a new opportunity for a leader to help with interactions.

Team members are often absorbed in the task at hand and they need to be. It is easy to forget the big picture. “Why are we doing this in the first place? Are we really going in the right direction, one that is aligned to the goals of the organization as a whole?” Regularly, a leader reminds team members to reflect on these questions.

To return to the situation at my companies when we introduced self-organized teams: Teams that have just formed don’t have a stable relationship yet. That takes time and care to develop. Since team members are trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing, they need even more direction than otherwise (e.g. more than: “take care of your customers”). And while our teams nominally had all they needed in the areas of resources and skills (and could always ask for help and support), they needed guidance and clear rules — they needed leadership that was explicit.

Results are the responsibility of the team

In most organizations we get this backwards. We make the team leader responsible for the results of the team. Typically we reinforce this either directly through blaming and praising or through monetary rewards or other kinds of measurement. When the leader concentrates only on results, relationships are ignored and team performance will suffer, which of course affects the results.

If the leader takes care of the individuals, the interactions between them, and helps them see the direction, then the team will take care of the results.

Is it the content?

There is another way to look at this task of taking care of individuals and interactions. We can differentiate between content and relationships.

If I am unable to separate content from the person and my relationship to the person, my tendency will be to judge people according to what they say or do. If I don’t like your idea or behavior, then I think: I don’t like YOU. I find reasons for the way you act or think that have something to do with your character. For example, I might think you must be dumb or lazy. I make assumptions and give up on people and wonder why I just can’t get the right people on the team (although it looked so promising when they introduced themselves).

If I can separate then I can address the content without hurting the individual. I can talk about what is not desirable or could be better and especially, I can find out what is really going on, instead of making assumptions and jumping to conclusions. By entering a connection, by offering and caring for the relationship, I engender trust which allows the team members to find solutions together with me and each other.

“There are always very good reasons for behavior — for that person, at that time, in that context, [the behavior] always makes absolute sense.”

— Frits Wilmsen

Managing the content

Relationships get neglected in our teams when we only focus on results, but that is not to say that content is unimportant. Content does need to be managed.

The questions managers of content try to answer are: what are we creating? How should we do it? When are we going to do it? What should it look like when it is finished? This kind of management is concerned not only with the result but also with the process of getting to the result.

As I said above, the result is the responsibility of the team. The leader makes sure the team is able to take the responsibility and nothing gets in the way of it. Managing the content is, therefore, not a leadership job. Whoever does it, whether the official team leader or not, is taking on the role of a manager. It can very well be done by someone who is not the leader. And the same goes for processes. A leader should make sure the team works on its processes, but is not necessarily the person who designs or facilitates the design of the processes. Ideally, the team should design its own processes and create its own agreements for working together.

Most likely the team members need support and facilitation for doing this. That is why agile teams have agile coaches or scrum masters. This can also be a job for a project manager or in the terms of Jurgen Appelo’s unFIX model: a “captain” who is in charge of the voyage (or flight) of a “crew.”

“Manage the system, not the people.”

— Jurgen Appelo

Creative conflict

The separation of content from relationships has another advantage. It allows us to have conflict in a productive way. Sometimes this is called “task conflict” as opposed to relational or personal conflict.

This “task conflict” is essential for generating new ideas and new ways forward. Friction creates warmth and energy. Without it we stay comfortable and nothing changes (or things cool down and become rigid).

Actually, humans always seem to need some kind of drama. If we are constantly trying to harmonize and get rid of tension, it will probably show up somewhere else, in gossiping or complaining, and issues won’t get addressed. We need a way to get into harmony with each other personally but at the same time we need to create a dramatic melody with the content of our work.

Creative conflict is possible in a team only if the members are striving toward the same goal and have no doubt that they each are accepted as individuals by the others. Recently, in two different books,** I have read of the story of the Wright Brothers as an example of this kind of conflict. It seems that they were very famous for fighting all the time. This remarkable ability to argue fiercely about the task and how to accomplish it, probably helped them to become the first to achieve motor-powered flight. Apparently they were irritated that other people couldn’t fight the way they did or got offended by their manner of discussion. Of course, not all siblings are that fortunate, but these brothers had a stable relationship with each other and a common goal to achieve that was more important than always being in agreement.

“In great teams, conflict becomes productive. The free flow of conflicting ideas is critical for creative thinking, for discovering new solutions no one individual would have come to on his own.”

— Peter M. Senge

Skills of leadership

If the leader takes care of the individuals, the interactions between them, and helps them see the directions then the team will take care of the results.

Well, maybe you are asking yourself, is this really leadership? I’m sure you have seen the picture of “what a leader really is”— that is the person that is going out in front of a team instead of pushing it from behind. Drawn as a comic with two boxes, on the left you have a person sitting on a wagon driving people who are pulling it. This box has the label “Boss.” On the right side, there is the same drawing of people pulling a wagon, but now there is someone in front of them encouraging them to follow (or even pulling with them). The label for this one is “Leader.”

This picture fits well with what the word “team” really means, or at least where it comes from: a team of horses or oxen. However, it is no longer useful for what we want and need a team to be today. Not only are we not oxen or horses, a team is not just pulling a wagon, it is creating something new.

If we can change the meaning of “team,” then we can do that with “leader” as well. A leader today is no longer someone who always goes before the team showing the way or pulling in the right direction.

To be a leader, I have one concern: that the team can do what it wants to do (create value) to the best of its abilities. As I explained in the Source of Leadership, a leader does not have just one role, but must take on different roles depending on the needs and state of the team. Therefore the skills that a leader must learn are concerned with performing these roles. Sometimes the team needs an expert, one that knows the content. Sometimes a coach or a negotiator or sponsor.

To develop the skills needed, a leader is willing to practice:

• asking coaching questions
• questioning own assumptions
• being curious and compassionate
• understanding humans and behaviors
• understanding the state and needs of a team
• separating content from relationships
• cultivating creative conflict
• learning negotiation and how to reach agreements
• promoting adult conversations

Leadership doesn’t need to know all about the details of the work (although a good understanding of the expertise is important) and it doesn’t need to know how to manage the system, the processes and the product. It is possible that a leader is also able to take on the roles of manager, but it is important that a leader understands which role she or he is performing at any moment in time.

“Leadership is the ability to facilitate a dialogue that’s aimed at making the whole more than the sum of its parts.”

— Frits Wilmsen

With this article, I have taken you through quite a few aspects of what leadership needs to be. I have explained the difference between leadership and management. I have shown that a leader concentrates on the needs of a team and not the results and processes and that, in order to do this, it is essential to differentiate between relationships and content. I have also explored the idea that doing so can lead us to more creativity by allowing us to enter into productive conflict instead of avoiding tension. And at the end, I provide you with a list of things a leader needs to learn and practice.

As overwhelming as that might all seem, the starting point is to understand what leadership is about and to realize when you are leading and when you are managing the content. The orientation for this is simply to ask yourself: Is my focus, right now, on the individuals, the interactions, and the big picture, so that the team has the resources that it needs, the members have good relationships with each other (and with me) and all have a clear direction to work toward?

Our teams needed explicit leaders back in 2014 when we created the x-teams (our name for the interdisciplinary, self-organized teams). And we needed to figure out what leadership meant for us and how it could be realized in our teams. Our first leaders were team members who already carried responsibility and cared a lot about their teams and the organization and the work. They also had to want to take on the role and actively work on defining the role. Together with this group we set off on a learning journey that lasted two years. The first steps were finding out what leadership means to us and what a leader does. Much of what we found out is still essential to my understanding of leadership and shows up in this article. When we had a clearer idea of leadership and what is needed, we could see what kind of skills a leader needs and started a program of individually chosen workshops and courses for our leaders. Two years later, things changed again. Our teams decided they didn’t need designated leaders anymore. Leadership in the teams became informal and shared — we had reached the state that we thought we would have in 2014 at the beginning. Of course, that is not the end of the story. Since 2016 things have changed and changed again. But those are stories for another time (some of them appear in other articles here).

Footnotes

*I am indebted to Bob Gower, whose post on LinkedIn inspired through its simplicity the requirements of a team that doesn’t need leadership. However, Bob uses the term “right people” where I refer to “resources.” I believe “right people” is misleading, firstly because it doesn’t separate skills from personality and secondly because there is more that the team needs than what the people bring with them.

**The books I mention that both use the story of Wright Brothers as an example of productive conflict are Conflicted by Ian Leslie and Think Again by Adam Grant.