“A team of all leaders go to Damascus”

M. Scott Peck in his 1998 book entitled “A Different Drum” used the term “a team of all leaders” to refer to a group of people who had the maturity to leave their egos aside from the group process and happily pass round the leadership, task responsibilities and workload. Crucially he surmised that for a group or team of people to get to this mature state they had to invest a great deal of time into how they were going to work together and their process, before concentrating on any objective or task at hand.

Richard Branson’s recent declaration that he was giving greater autonomy to business teams to determine their own individual working hours and patterns is to be hopefully, potentially, applauded. It also appears to be following in the footsteps of other modern organisations such as Netflix.

Letting teams self determine their own working routines is not a new Idea. Ricardo Semler in his books “The 7 Day Weekend” and “Maverick” published in 1998 and 2004, describes how he achieved significant gains in business performance by passing responsibility for work programming and approach out to all parts of the business. Semler’s view was “if someone in the team wants to take his child to the cinema on a Monday afternoon, then they should be able to”. The idea is that a person’s immediate team and peers organise themselves to allow this to happen and make sure that people output or performance is not compromised.

Semler claimed that this approach did more than maintain output, and the case studies carried out showed that levels of innovation and output went up while some costs came down. . . . . Perfect, lets all go do it!

I know I can hear your “what if’s” “buts” and “howevers” to the power of 10.

1. “What if” the customer that person is responsible for managing is only available at the same time as the Monday cinema session?

2. “What if” the other teams we work alongside have different patterns and needs?

3. “What if” Mr X is really a bit lazy and relies on Mr Y and Miss Z to cover his duties all the bl _ _ dy! time?

These questions are all valid but mature teams can manage these and other difficult issues. The key word is Mature and to get to this state takes time, training and support. I would argue that there also needs to be some robustness and cash/slack in the organisation as it makes a transition to self-determined teams as the road to Damascus is never straight or flat. Teams and people will take time to adjust, there will be ups and downs, and setting out on this journey without the right resources is foolish. The time to do this is when you’re on the up or on the early part of a down but never when you’re on the edge.

The organisation’s that have been on this journey mostly, but not exclusively, present the upsides of the journey. There aren’t many organizations that are happy to expose all the downsides of this type of initiative for others to learn from, the corporate ego/brand, market position and share price often lead to the real useful ideas being left in the laundry and not on the line.

A good example of the difficulties of self-determined teams was highlighted through a recent peer-learning group we were involved with. The team was formed as part of a company specific leadership programme run in conjunction with a UK university. Each team is set a project to complete collaboratively after each course module, which had to be completed before the next module.

Simple !? . . . . Unfortunately not!

The team, although all working for the same company, were separated by function, projects and geography. The project was straight forward, the objective seemed clear and workload was distributed fairly, but not with any consideration of each person’s other work demands or the environment each of them worked in.

“We all worked in the same business, it should have been easy?”

“The objective appeared clear and we were all enthused, we could not see a need to talk it through” which lead to a team member saying “I wish I’d been more insistent in us sitting down and working out how we were going to work, it was typical of the way we are in our business, getting over excited about the task and not exploring the how”

The problem for any form of team is that holding the type of conversations required can feel like signing a pre-nuptial agreement. We’re worried it will “spoil the love”, “kill the momentum” get in the way and that “all we’ll end up doing is discussing the downright obvious anyway”.

When we’ve run reviews for teams suffering “a bit of stress” it’s nearly always the small obvious things that everybody knew about but didn’t discuss that are causing the pain and disrupting performance.

Regular development is essential at all points of a teams project or annual lifecycle.

If you are going to do as Branson and Semler have done and give your teams ultimate choice over when and how they work, you best give them the skills, techniques and communication flow to thrive in such an environment.

A team of all leaders, whether in London or Damascus, is a mature state achieved through training not hope and the odd trip down the pub.

Team Training – You Get What You Put In:

But we’re bound to say all, this we do the training, we see the examples of the pain and the pleasure of working in teams and the value they can add. . . or not!

Berrison design and deliver training, engagement and change programmes for leaders and business teams. Training that supports change, growth, innovation and efficiency. If you would like to find out more about our employee training please get in touch.

Author: Colin Dulson