Team Leadership

Citation

Campbell, R.A. (2003), "Team Leadership", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 22 No. 10, pp. 919-921. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621710310505502

Professor Charles Margerison is a noted academic and consultant. He is the author of many articles and various practical books on management consultancy and practice. He is, as the book suggests, renowned for his “team management wheel”, which he developed with Dick McCann. I have read a number of his books and am impressed with their brevity and clarity, based as they are upon practical and pragmatic experience.

As a consultant/academic I am very glad to have this book as part of my repertoire of tools and techniques, however before considering the specific content of the book, I have two general observations.

First, it was I believe Lenin who observed that theory without practise and practise without theory was ineffective. Theory that is not able to add value to the practise of change in organisations is not worth having, but practise without a strong theoretical base is also of concern. I am not suggesting that that the instruments in this book have not been fully tested and validated, indeed chapter 16 deals with these research findings. It would however have been helpful to understand the theory underpinning the various conceptual frameworks presented. I do appreciate that it was written for a specific audience, however the result would I believe have provided both a more rounded symmetry and helpful context for the application of the model.

Second, while Margerison provides a useful framework of disaggregation, we all accept that the real world does not operate in neat conceptual models. As Mintzberg showed in his Nature of Managerial Work the traditional model of plan, organise, etc. does not bear a close reality as to how hard pressed executives actually behave, day by day. How managers act individually, they also act collectively. Corporate management behaviour cannot easily be described as a classification of positive prescriptive attributes but rather can be a morass of politics, power, values and expectations with different visions interspersed throughout. It is clear that the attributes identified by the author are extremely important and the approach provides a vital focus, but the dangers of following a linear prescription need to be understood and managed carefully with any assumptions concerning application made explicit and evaluated. The complexity and dynamic nature of development and change make this essential. That aside, the team framework is helpful, insightful and the various forms of analysis made possible by it, provides a wealth of useful information on which to build management and team development.

The framework

The book provides an overview and explanation in some detail of the attributes for top team effectiveness, namely: “advising” – how to get relevant information, “innovating” – creating ideas, “promoting”‐ selling the message, “developing” – ways to test and plan, “inspecting” – how to get the details right, “maintaining” – ensuring quality support and service, “producing” – ways of delivering results, and “organizing” – arranging who does what. The final attribute is that of “linking”, whereby synthesis through the connections between the attributes is achieved.

Each of the attributes is covered well with useful explanation and elaboration, for example under ‘Development’ seven main areas of development are discussed together with advice on how to work with developers and developing skills. I found bullet point lists of considerations informative and very useful. The constraints of the book however mean that many of the questions that arise from reading the chapters could not be covered. I would have liked to hear, for example, from Professor Margerison on how to encourage “development” in areas of transformational and transactional change. I found the exercise sections at the end of the chapters on work functions, especially helpful.

Where the book does really come into its own is in chapters on leadership and team linking, and the clever integration of the attributes and personal and team‐work preferences. The author lists eleven linking skills from listen before deciding to encourage respect, which while obvious we need to be reminded of them and in this context. He also explains types of linking such as linking people and tasks, and team development and delegation. The attributes are further explored within the context of team linking with a frank and honest discussion.

Team preferences is displayed on a personal team management wheel covering such archetypes as “advisers”, “explorers”, “ organisers” and “controllers”. This chapter is very useful because it provides an insight into one's own preferences and the assumptions one makes about how one views the world but also gives clues as to why others colleagues think and act the way they do. Such understanding is vital in top teams and is often missing. Professor Margerison goes further to helpfully integrate work preferences with job demand. I would have appreciated a larger section on team linking and task‐ and work‐preference linking as this was clearly the heart of the model and I would have benefited from a greater discussion on context and process examples. Nevertheless it was insightful and very helpful.

The last chapter provides an interesting synthesis among the different parts of the model together with their respective instruments that underpin them: team management profiles, linking skills profiles, types of work profiles and team‐performance profiles. This package offers real help in offering a comprehensive analysis of work preferences, work types, individuals linking ability and team performance. The analysis can only be provided by team management services.

This book by Professor Margerison provides a timely and useful approach to considering core attributes and work preferences. It gives insights to developing these attributes and how, with the integration of work preferences, useful data can be gathered.

The skill of course is interpreting how a particular team will function and where the tensions, rubbing points and the synergies will be. The analysis provides a useful foundation for this but this is a very complex much specialised area, requiring a breadth and depth of understanding and experience. Care needs to be taken in the application of advice stemming from the data obtained from the various instruments.

In conclusion, this book is a useful, timely and easily‐read addition to an area that is rightly receiving more attention, and where advice and guidance is necessary. Professor Margerison's assistance is much appreciated. I strongly recommend it.