Leadership Teams: Developing and Sustaining High Performance

Citation

Tuckman, B.W. (2010), "Leadership Teams: Developing and Sustaining High Performance", Management Decision, Vol. 48 No. 2, pp. 340-344. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251741011022653

Sheard, Kakabadse, and Kakabadse, in their new book, Leadership Teams, emphasize that, in a business management setting, teamwork is essential to realize high performance, and provide us with a six‐stage model of group development to facilitate and survive the process of working with teams. The model is spread out over six chapters, sandwiched between a short introductory chapter on the conceptual framework and a longer, closing chapter on grace under pressure that goes beyond the six‐stage model. The book's heavy emphasis on “leadership” and “teamwork” is reflected in the book's title.

Mobilizing, the first group development stage, is described in Chapter 2. It has four elements: forming the group (managers attempting to allocate organizational resources to achieve a new goal and determine the skills and expertise it requires); creativity and innovation (identifying, in a practical way, what the goal or objective means and how to mobilize it); decision making (making the decision to allocate resources to achieve a new goal that requires cooperation, coordination, and cognition, with a manager taking personal responsibility for it); and ways of working (goal‐based planning, defining milestones, and focusing on problems and what can be done to solve them). Group members or potential members are faced with the question: “Do I agree with what the leader is asking this group to do?”

Also introduced in this first stage is a case study of the “Traditional Turbine Co”. to help the reader “understand how an organization decides to pursue one goal from the many options available” (p. 18). This engaging and illuminating case study runs through the entire book to provide the reader with concrete illustrations of the dynamics of each stage of the group development model. As an instructional tool, the forty or so case study installments contribute significantly to the content of the book and help clarify and concretize many of the book's concepts.

Confrontation, the second group development stage, is described in Chapter 3. It reflects the “inevitability of conflict in complex organizations” (p. 49). This stage is divided into two elements: understanding conflict and managing conflict, and conflict can be either task conflict or relationship conflict. The source of conflict is based on different points of view between the expectations of group members and those of their manager. Discussions deteriorate into arguments and cause group members to lose sight of the goal and avoid other members they do not like. Furthermore, group members' assumptions about what they will be doing often turn out to be wrong, resulting in open criticism, interpersonal conflict, and loss of interest in the group's objectives. The result is rejection of the leader.

But as is true throughout this book, the authors do not lead their readers into a dead end, thus their focus on managing conflict. Eschewing conflict avoidance as a possible strategy, the authors recommend that managers should expect conflict, but facilitate its management by avoiding personal attacks and trying to improve working relationships. One needs to manifest leadership behavior during this stage. The chapter ends with the authors' providing six specific strategies for managing conflict, along with examples of each from the case study, which contributes significantly to the practical value of the book.

Chapter 4 deals with the third stage, coming together, which provides a distinction between management, an organization's formal structure for creating and monitoring performance, and leadership, coping with change. The two elements of this stage are work‐based relationships (representing the difference between a group and a collection of individuals) and working in groups (with the manager building a network of relationships and the focus shifting to the group). As in the previous chapter, Chapter 4 ends with a detailed list of leadership behaviors required in this stage.

Chapter 5 moves on to the fourth stage, one step forward, two steps back, which breaks the linear pattern of the preceding stages. Group members are faced with the question: “Do I accept the role I will have to play to work in this group?” (p. 108). The focus of this stage is on group culture or “the way things are done around here” (p. 112). While leaders are expected to manage culture change so that “the group can survive in a changing environment” (p. 121), group members resist cultural change, preferring to stick with the culture in which they are embedded. They take previously successful courses of action for granted.

We are told that the transition from the coming together stage (stage 3) to the one step forward, two steps back stage (stage 4) is triggered by new group members challenging new group norms and practices, the leader's being seen as untrustworthy, and the subsequent departure of key members. To me, the group's slipping back into conflict smacks of “confrontation” (stage 2), rather than the appearance of a new stage, but the authors contend that it is different because the group has already “been through the process of agreeing what they need to accomplish” (p. 109) in the coming together stage. However, the process stalls, the group splits into factions, and a leadership battle ensues. The authors contend that in the confrontation stage, the group rejects its goals, while in the one step forward, two steps back stage, the conflict results from the leader's actions and intended plan. In other words, it becomes “personal”.

With leadership being a major issue at this stage, the authors go on to distinguish between leadership and management in that “leaders create and change cultures, while managers live within them” (p. 113). Leadership, thus, enables a change in “the way things are done around here”(p. 112). In order to help group members deal with cultural change, leaders must help them develop competencies or specific skills required to perform a job and capabilities or “the ability and willingness to apply competencies within a particular context” (p. 130). The chapter ends with a description of six leadership behaviors needed at the one step forward, two steps back stage (listening to group members, enlisting key managers' support, taking your time, focusing on and reinforcing the importance of the group's goal, avoiding a focus on interpersonal issues, and providing inspirational leadership).

The fifth stage, described in Chapter 6, is behaving as one, turning a group of people into a team. The authors define a team as “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” (p. 145). On a team, members pursue shared objectives and eschew individual agendas. This stage is comprised of two elements:

1. 1.

   teams working with other teams, that is, being an “open system”, open to exchanges with its environment; and

2. 2.

   engaging others, that is, responding to teammates and other key stakeholders.

A group becomes a team when its members have a shared agenda rather than personal ones. All members of a team must be fully involved and be willing to accept that change is necessary when productivity is the goal.

The authors use the following three indicators as a benchmark that a team has entered the behaving as one stage:

1. 1.

   agreement on the goal in terms of practical deliverables;

2. 2.

   shared and distributed leadership within a team; and

3. 3.

   a leader who is both available and able to make unpopular or difficult judgment calls.

In completing a task, the critical questions asked are who needs to work with whom, what authority do they need, and how and by whom will they be managed. “Boundary management extends to the creation of new boundaries around new collaborative teams, and the reconciliation of collaborative team members' individual agendas” (p. 165).

To be engaged, team members, need to be a part of the decision‐making process; that requires responsibility and accountability. Everyone must take part; everyone must embrace dialogue with others. Managers no longer need to motivate team members to perform. The authors identify five leadership behaviors:

1. 1.

   publicly recognize outstanding performance;

2. 2.

   encourage team members to improve communication by networking;

3. 3.

   enable team members to present completed work to managers outside the team;

4. 4.

   intervene when needed to diffuse interpersonal tensions; and

5. 5.

   formalize working practices within the organizational infrastructure, to ensure they become embedded.

The sixth and last stage, described in Chapter 7, is facing the future, which requires managing yourself and developing leaders. Managing yourself, as described by the authors, has six aspects:

1. 1.

   listen and reflect on what people say;

2. 2.

   hear what people say and consider the implications for leadership action;

3. 3.

   take the initiative, reach out to others, and engage, even when difficult;

4. 4.

   control anxiety and do not take criticism personally;

5. 5.

   build trust and an environment in which others can trust you; and

6. 6.

   work to gain credibility in the eyes of others in order to gain support for a course of action.

Developing leaders deals with a manager's choices and the consequences of those choices on supervisees. The authors provide six aspects:

1. 1.

   understand the context and respond to it; flexibility is key;

2. 2.

   position and time potentially unpopular messages with care;

3. 3.

   pick your moment to give and ask for feedback;

4. 4.

   communicate with others and delineate roles;

5. 5.

   get the best out of others; and

6. 6.

   provide a vision of how the future will be different based on leadership action in the present.

The chapter ends with a list of six leadership behaviors needed in the facing the future stage:

1. 1.

   keep a low profile;

2. 2.

   try to keep key team members from being transferred to other jobs;

3. 3.

   resist changing the team's goal;

4. 4.

   recognize the loss we experience from disbanding the team;

5. 5.

   ask team members if their expectations of the team were fulfilled; and

6. 6.

   identify “follow on” goals and assign individuals to teams likely to fulfill individual expectations.

Chapter 8 is titled “Grace under pressure” and is intended to describe the integrated group development process, but it does not include any group development stages. Its topics are grounded under pressure, resilience under pressure, collaboration under pressure, adaptability under pressure, maturity under pressure, and finally, the audacity of hope. While it is interesting and includes the case study, the chapter cannot be said to have an obvious connection to stages of group development.

This is an interesting book to read and provides insight into the team or group development process, particularly in the context of business management. My interest in its conception of group development stages was stimulated by the fact that I had developed a model of group development stages (Tuckman, 1965; Tuckman and Jensen, 1977) that has been around now for 44 years and, despite its age, continues to be an influence on the group development process. I posited four stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing, and then, along with Mary Ann Jensen, added a fifth stage, adjourning.

I would say that all five of my stages overlap to some degree with five of the six stages described in the book. Mobilizing is similar to forming (indeed one of its elements is forming the group), confrontation (where both of its elements involve conflict) to storming, coming together (where its elements deal with group relationships) to norming, behaving as one (working with other teams and enagaging others) to performing, and facing the future (managing yourself and developing leaders) to adjourning. The only stage in the book that has no direct correspondence to any one of my stages is one step forward, two steps back, although it does overlap somewhat with both storming and norming. One explanation for this “omission” would be that I left something out. But a more likely explanation is that my identification of the stages was based on observations and descriptions of therapy groups, training (or T) groups, social and professional groups (e.g. presidential advisory councils), and laboratory groups (e.g. students) (Tuckman, 1965, 2001), while the group examined in the Leadership Teams book was a business management group including engineers, sales directors, product developers, designers, finance specialists, project managers, and draftsmen. It is not unreasonable to expect such a large number and wide range of professionals, working on a major project, to have to take “one step forward and two steps back”.

One last observation: During the course of my career over the past 46 years, I have found myself in the position of administrator, particularly dean, and the dean role has been rocky at times, especially in regard to group development, at which some see me as an expert. Reading the Leadership Teams book, I discovered strategies for leading and managing groups that, had I known them then, would have made me a more effective administrator. There is not much I can do about that now, but recommend to others that they read this insightful book before it is too late.