Team Leadership – A Guide to Success with Team Management Systems

Citation

Mattacks, K. (2003), "Team Leadership – A Guide to Success with Team Management Systems", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 52-53. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2003.24.1.52.2

In many businesses these days the team is the unit of organisation where competitive advantage is won or lost. Consequently, methods for improving the leadership of teams are likely to be of interest to managers. Now I have to make a confession. I have always been a Belbin fan and used his team roles questionnaire in this sort of work for many years. A generation of managers, in the UK at least, has become familiar with the notion of team roles such as “shapers” and “plants”. Whilst I have been aware of the Margerison‐McCann team management system (TMS), I have not worked with it. But, like Belbin, the TMS approach focuses on explaining why some individuals, teams, and organisations perform, work effectively and achieve their objectives, while others fail – a key concern for organisations.

This book puts forward a “new approach” to team leadership based on the Margerison McCann team management wheel. The author, Charles Margerison, first developed this with Dick McCann over ten years ago. Since then it has been used by a large number of organisations in over 40 countries. This latest book seeks to apply the lessons learned from these organisations to provide team leaders, trainers and consultants with a practical guide to team leadership based on “the wheel”. There are two aspects to the team wheel. The first relates to team tasks and functions and the second to personal aspects and work preferences. Tasks comprise

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  Advising: gathering and reporting information.

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  Innovating: creating and experimenting with ideas.

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  Promoting: exploring and presenting opportunities.

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  Developing: assessing and planning applications.

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  Organising: organising staff and resources.

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  Producing: concluding and delivering outputs.

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  Inspecting: controlling and auditing contracts and procedures.

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  Maintaining: upholding and safeguarding standards and values.

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  Linking: co‐ordinating and integrating the work of others.

At the personal level, the same analysis applies. Each person has strengths around the team wheel and other areas where they are not so strong. Team members complement each other provided there are good links between them. Linking is therefore seen as a key task and behaviour.

The book’s structure reflects the critical part the wheel plays in its discussion of team leadership. After two introductory chapters, there follow eight chapters looking at each of the tasks and two more dedicated to linking. These aim to show how the team skills apply to each of the team work areas. They use practical examples and cases to illustrate the issues. Each is slightly different in its approach and this does enable focus on the individual nature of each skill. Some have a section on learning points, some include a summary and some, but not all, include a section on working with people with different preferences. I did find this inconsistency a little frustrating. It makes it more difficult to “dip in” to sections that interest the reader. The following chapters emphasise “linking” skills as the basis of effective leadership and discuss “the language of teamwork” that facilitates cross‐functional team effectiveness. This includes an interesting idea of different “coloured” meetings to represent different types of team task. For example, innovating meetings when looking for new ideas.

This book will be very useful to those already familiar with the Margerison‐McCann team wheel who want material to support them in using it as a development tool either for themselves or for use in management and team development. If you are a fan you will enjoy it. By the same token, those wanting to know more about team management systems’ range of integrated, work‐based, assessments and feedback instruments will also find this useful. The book concludes with a chapter on the research base for the team wheel and an appendix that includes a description of the instruments, a copy of the team management questionnaire and a sample profile.

For me, what is new about this book is that it looks at team leadership through the team wheel. The case examples are useful as is the central idea that there are eight team tasks that need to be effectively linked and in which we each have preferences and skills. There are also some sound, practical ideas. But if you want to apply the ideas you will have to pay for the team management questionnaire and related tools to gain full benefit. In that sense Team Leadership lived up to its sub‐title and felt like “the book of the instrument”! But I did say I was a Belbin fan!