A seminal paper on leadership functions identifies 15
functions divided amongst two mutually dependent phases of team activity
(Morgeson et al, 2009). The first phase, called transition, consists of evaluation
and planning activities. The second phase shifts focus to goal accomplishment.
Transition phase leadership functions, maintain the authors,
include:
- Compose the team – bringing together the best
available people for the job, taking into account complementary competences and
ability to work together for a common goal
- Define the mission – clarifying the team purpose
- Establish performance expectations and set team
goals – goals which are appropriately challenging and motivating
- Structure and plan – dividing out tasks and
responsibilities, scheduling and so on
- Train and develop team members – including
through coaching by the leader
- Sense-making — defined
as “identifying essential environmental events, interpreting these events given
the team’s performance situation, and communicating this interpretation to the
team”
- Providing
feedback – both to individuals and to the team collectively
Action phase leadership functions include:
- Monitor the team – “examining
the team’s processes, performance, and the external team context”
- Manage team boundaries – “representing the team’s interests to
individuals and groups outside the team in order to protect the team from
interference as well as persuading others to support them” and co-ordinating
activities with other teams
- Challenge the team – its performance,
assumptions and ways of working
- Perform team tasks – “participating
in, intervening in, or otherwise performing some of the team’s task work”
- Solve problems – diagnosing and resolving
issues that prevent performance
- Provide resources – for example, information,
equipment, finance and people
- Encourage team self-management – empowerment,
accountability and responsibility
- Support the team social climate – encouraging
positive and supportive behaviours between team members
While a superhero leader may take on all of these functions
in their entirety, in most teams some of the responsibility – or at least the
delivery – of every one of them can be shared with the team or distributed
among them at least to some extent. From our studies of high performing teams,
we can see examples for all 15 leadership functions:
- Compose
the team. Where team members interview and have a strong voice in selection
of new members, it tends to have a positive effect on whether a hire will work
out. In part, this is because they are able to bring different and multiple
perspectives, compared to relying solely on the leader’s impressions of the
person. A moderating factor may be the team’s willingness to embrace diversity
in new members.
- Define the
mission. In practice, with the sometimes exception of the leadership team,
the mission is provided from above. The task for the team and the leader is to
interpret the mission in ways that make sense for the team and align with both
corporate and team values. If the team is to embrace and own the mission, it must have some input into its expression
and the narrative around it. The mission then becomes a collaborative endeavour
between the formal leader and the team members. In some cases, the team becomes
the custodian of the mission. For example, in a hospital pressure from above to
hit arbitrary targets led the leader of a clinical team to lose track of the
team’s primary mission (patient care). A principled stand by the team gave him
the courage (and the ammunition) to resist the pressures upon him.
- Establish
performance expectations and set team goals. When people set their own
goals and performance indicators, they tend to be more demanding.
- Structure
and plan. When the entire team understands the goals and the priorities,
they are well-equipped to manage this process without the leader’s input, or
with the leader providing oversight and approval. Over the decades, I have
encountered a variety of organizations, where teams self-organize, deciding
their own priorities and even, in some cases, how they should be rewarded. In
recent years, Frederic Laloux has documented multiple examples of the benefits
of shifting responsibility for who does what and when to the team members and
away from leaders external to the team.
- Train and
develop. The leader of a team is not necessarily the most competent and
knowledgeable person in relation to the tasks the team undertakes. (If they
are, it is harder for them to step outside and above a focus on the task.) The idea
that the role of a leader is to coach the team is widespread, but highly
questionable. A definition more in line with current understanding of effective
team leadership is that the leader’s responsibility is to support the creation
of a coaching culture, where everyone in the team may coach each other. (Ideally, including the team members coaching
the leader.)
- Sense-making.
The assumption that sense-making is a top down process, with the leader
interpreting events in the light of greater knowledge of business strategy and
the wider business context, may also be challenged as overly simplistic. The
perceptions of internal and external customers. For example, may also play a
role in sense-making and team member may have higher connectedness with these
resources than the leader. Long-serving team members may also be better than a
less experienced leader at linking current events with team history.
- Providing
feedback. The literature on leader-member exchange is replete with studies
that conclude managers are poor at giving developmental feedback. A recent Harvard Business Review report
(Whitlock, 2018) found that 44% of managers found giving feedback stressful or
difficult and nearly half of these avoided giving feedback. The literature on
psychological safety (which is strongly linked to team performance) finds that
honest feedback between team members (and from team members to the leader) are
key indicators of a psychological safe environment. In a healthy team,
feedback-giving in all directions is an essential attribute. Both the leader
and team members also have the ability to gather feedback from external
stakeholders, to inform how the team evaluates its performance.
- Monitoring
the team. Transparent processes that allow the team and its leader to recognise
when tasks are going well and less well and how the team is performing against
agreed targets are very basic tools of management. But who decides what the
measures should be, how to collect them and when they should be adjusted to new
circumstances? There appears anecdotally to be a strong connection between
employees’ perception that a measure is or isn’t helpful to their job roles and
the emotional connection with and commitment to the measure. If this is
correct, then it makes sense for team members to have greater say in the design
and implantation of measures and how they are monitored.
- Managing
the boundaries. Teams do not normally work in isolation. Every interaction
with someone outside the team has an impact on team reputation. It can be
argued that a responsibility of a leader is to manage reputation upwards, while
team members take greater responsibility for reputation management horizontally
and below.
- Challenging
the team. In a study of team learning that I conducted with European Union
funding some 20 years ago (Clutterbuck 1998), I identified a number of roles
that team members played. These included roles related to challenging the
team’s assumptions, ways of working and so on. If the leader is the only one
providing this kind of challenge, it creates the potential for the team members
to abdicate their own responsibility for innovation and self-challenge. The
argument is that the leader, being wholly or partial external to the team, has
a clearer perspective. In reality, team members can just as easily invite
customers to present to them. Moreover, new team members can provide valuable
different perspectives in their first few weeks with them team.
- Performing
team tasks. The balance of the leader’s role between facing upwards and
facing downwards can be delicate and vary widely with context. If the leader is
inside or partially inside the team, they have greater potential to become a
role model. The danger is that they do too much of the day-to-day work (often
because they enjoy it) and not enough stepping back and stepping out. If the
team and the leader can regularly discuss together what the team needs from the
leader, then a healthier allocation of work may result.
- Solve
problems. How many times have we heard the maxim “Don’t just bring me
problems; bring me solutions”? The leader as heroic fixer disempowers his or
her team. A better option for high performance is to develop the skills of the
team individually and collectively to be creative and innovate.
- Provide
resources. By virtue of hierarchical authority and the links that that
provides with resource-holders, formal leaders are arguably more likely to be
successful in ensuring the team is allocated the resources it needs. But
outside of the formal structures resource acquisition takes place through the
relationships individuals have with colleagues in other teams. In a study of
talent management (Clutterbuck, 2012) I was struck by the way that people
demonstrated leadership qualities through informal interactions on the
intranet. One of the conclusions of the study was that identifying issues that
needed to be tackled (opportunities or problems), developing innovate solutions
and bringing together the resources to implement those decisions often happened
without any intervention from hierarchical leaders at all. People sharing ideas
on the intranet would volunteer information and sometimes time to bring ideas
from concept to reality. There is probably a threshold, where informal
leadership of this kind has to give way to more structured processes in order
to obtain the level of financial support needed. In the work team, however,
making stakeholder engagement and resource acquisition a collective
responsibility fits well within a digital world.
- Encourage
team self-management. Yes, it’s important for the leader to do this, but
peer support is also a factor in how well people manage themselves. Collective
self-management requires team members to accept responsibility for educating
and supporting colleagues – for example, by coaching and mentoring.
- The social
climate. It is often said that the leader creates the climate. Their mood affects
that of everyone else in the team. Equally, the host isn’t the only one who
makes a party – the guests have a role to play, too. The social climate is
underpinned by fizz (enjoyment of the
work you do) and buzz (enjoying the
company around you). The greater the say the team has in how work is allocated
to fit with each member’s interests and energy and in who joins the team, the
more positive the social climate will be, irrespective of the leader’s mood!
Implications for team coaching
Critical questions team coaching may pose to a team and its
leader include:
- What kind of leadership does this team need to
best achieve its mission?
- Which functions of leadership are most important
for this team?
- Which of those functions, if any, should be
solely the responsibility of the leader?
- Which would be best delegated to the team
itself?
- Which should be shared responsibilities?
- How can we assess the quality of how we
implement these leadership functions?
- What additional resources do we need to
distribute leadership in this way?
Facilitating open and perceptive conversations around these
topics opens the teams’ eyes to all sorts of possibilities. The leadership
functions reviewed in this article provide a useful fall-back when the team is
unable to clarify the most relevant leadership functions for its circumstances.
However, expect to identify others not in this list. For example, Morgeson et
al include protecting the team from interference as part f boundary management,
but for many teams this is one of the most important roles they expect of a
manager. In a case represented for review in a recent team coach training
workshop, the leader’s inability to provide that protection was a major cause
of the team’s dysfunction.
Overall, the job of the team coach is to help the team take
a much more perceptive and nuanced view of the role of leadership and to
distinguish between the role of a
leader and the functions of
leadership. The permutations of how the team and its leader might work together
then become much, much wider.
David Clutterbuck, 2019
Bibliography
Clutterbuck, D (1998) Learning within Teams Herts TEC/
European Social Fund, St Albans
Clutterbuck, D (2002) The
Talent Wave, Kogan Page, London
Laloux, F (2014) Reinventing Organizatons, Nelson Parker,
Brussels
Morgeson,
F. P., Derue, D. S., & Karam, E. P. (2009). Leadership in Teams: A
Functional Approach to Understanding Leadership Structures and Processes. Journal
of Management, 36(1), 5-39. doi: 10.1177/0149206309347376
Whitlock, T (May
2018) Harvard Business Review: Employee
Performance Management is broken
www.standardforsuccess.com/harvard-business-review-employee-performance-management-is-broken/
