Ineffective Leadership Teams
Whenever I talk to senior leaders, I hear two things consistently: Firstly, they believe that leadership is a team sport, so they have formed a leadership team which is composed of great individuals. Secondly, they believe that this leadership team is not as effective as it could and should be. When inquiring a little bit more, I often learn that one or several of these issues are at play:
The team has a lot on their to-do list but gets very little done.
The team has a hard time making decisions (and following through with them). Therefore the leader ends up making all the important decisions (which they wanted to avoid in the first place), or the decisions are not being made at all.
Not all team members show up to every team meeting. This makes the team go in circles, because they spend a lot of time bringing everyone up to speed all the time. It also makes it even harder to follow through with action items, because they never know for sure who will show up next time.
There’s little energy in the team meetings. People often seem disengaged.
While every team is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for leadership teams, I believe there are a couple of root causes that lead to the outlined problems (and several more).
The leadership team is too big
In my experience, the group size should not go into double digits - ideally the team is much smaller. Probably the main reason why leadership teams are so big (and they tend to grow even bigger over time) is what Ruth Wageman calls “excessive inclusiveness”. In her great book Senior Leadership Teams she writes:
“Function, title, and past performance or expertise are not adequate tickets for admission. [...] What we are looking for in a team member is the ability to put hard questions and strong disagreements on the table and work them through to a conclusion that benefits the enterprise and its stakeholders. ”
While this makes perfect sense to every leader I talk to, they often have a hard time telling people that they will not be a member of the leadership team (although some of their peers are). They might be very good leaders. They might have a lot of experience and the right title. And still they should not be on that team.
What often happens in reality, though, is that everyone with a specific role or title automatically becomes enrolled in the leadership team. For instance, every senior engineering manager (SEM) and every senior product manager (SPM) might be on the leadership team. The first issue with this approach is that some of those individuals might not even be interested. But telling your boss that you don’t want “a seat at the table” seems like a career-limiting move.
And then there’s the other big issue with this approach: the group size. Even if the group is small enough in the beginning, it will most certainly grow over time, because the organization might be growing and people get promoted.
It’s unclear what type of team this is
While “leadership team” sounds great, it doesn’t tell us anything about the team’s purpose or what’s expected of the team members. In fact it’s a big difference if the primary team purpose is information sharing, consultation, coordination or decision making (Ruth Wageman defines these as the four general types of leadership teams). If this is unclear, people will have different assumptions about their roles, commitments and contributions in the team, which is a recipe for disaster.
People are members of multiple teams
I don’t think I have ever heard a leader say that they are only part of one team. When you ask them about it, they frequently name three, four or even more teams. For instance, a SEM might be part of the senior leadership, the team they are leading themselves, and the team of all EMs in the organization (and now we haven’t even looked at project teams). It’s questionable if all of these groups should be called “teams”, and it’s even more questionable if someone can really be a dedicated team member of three or more teams at the same time. I have blogged about this issue in more detail in my post First Team and Divided Loyalties.
Case Study
If we address these three issues (which is hard and takes time and dedication), some or even all of the issues outlined above might disappear. For instance, I was part of a weekly leadership meeting, in which engagement was very low. This meeting felt like an exercise in frustration, and most people would admit it when asked privately. Yet most of them would show up every week, because they felt it was expected of them and they didn’t want to sabotage their own career, since their manager was leading the meeting (ironically, this very manager also hated this meeting and felt he had to run it, because it was expected of him). One source of frustration was the meeting agenda: Often there was none, or it was created hastily in the beginning of the meeting. On other occasions, the agenda felt like a laundry list of disjointed topics, lacking any coherence. No matter how often someone demanded that there should be a better agenda and it should be sent out in advance, it would rarely happen. After some investigation, we learned that the boring meeting and the missing agenda was only a symptom of a deeper problem. The meeting attendees did not perceive this group as a real team. All of them saw themselves more like representatives of their other teams, which they were committed to. So oftentimes they saw attending the leadership meeting as a waste of time (“I have other things to do in my real team.”) And the main use they saw in this meeting was to lobby for their respective team, whenever they had something that needed support with (which was of course frustrating to everyone else).
After we had surfaced these issues (and a couple more), the manager would eventually dismantle this “team” and start a new, smaller leadership team with a dedicated purpose, clear boundaries and much higher commitment. Although this decision was not popular with everyone at first, several people were relieved that they finally got “permission” to fully dedicate their time to their real team.
Takeaways
Building strong leadership teams is hard. Whenever we see a leadership team that is disengaged or even dysfunctional, it’s worth digging a little bit deeper to find out what’s brewing under the surface. A too big team size, an unclear purpose and people being members of too many teams are three common root causes for leadership teams not living up to the leader’s expectations.
Strukturen moderner Unternehmen
Am 18./19.12.2024 gebe ich mit meinem Bruder Stefan eine Schulung in Hamburg. Dort werden wir mit vielen Praxisbeispielen erörtern, wie man Unternehmen auf Effektivität, Flow und Innovation ausrichten kann.