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In The Wisdom of Teams,[1] Katzenbach and Smith highlighted the importance of using teams to achieve high organizational performance. During their research on teamwork in the early 1990s, they discovered that senior teams, or ‘teams at the top’, operated differently from teams at other levels of the organization. In a 1994 article in the McKinsey Quarterly,[2] Katzenbach and Smith highlighted their seminal thinking on top teams.
Katzenbach and Smith identified five characteristics separating a mediocre team from a high performing team, as discussed in the Leading Thinking Element. Although these characteristics apply to teams at every organizational level, Katzenbach and Smith found that senior executives tended to have misguided assumptions about the characteristics of effective senior teams. They highlighted a number of these assumptions, including:
- The mission of any team at the top is, and should be, virtually indistinguishable from the mission of the company as a whole.
- All of the CEO’s ‘direct reports’ must be members of the team.
- Formal team leadership, to be credible, must be exercised by the most senior member – that is, by the CEO.
- What each member does as part of the team should be consistent with his or her organizational position and role.
The authors believe that if a group operates according to these misguided ideas, it will do so as just that: a group and not a team. A group is simply defined as a group of individuals that contributes towards a goal but never shares tasks. A group’s output will therefore be the sum of its parts. A team, on the other hand, will work on tasks that are interdependent and an effective team’s output will be more than the sum of its parts.
Katzenbach and Smith also found that organizations tend to make the mistake of assuming that leaders should either perform exclusively as teams or as workgroups, when the reality is that some leadership aspects require a team approach and others require the attention of a workgroup.
The authors advocated that senior executives should approach this issue by using teamwork only when the need arises, and not on an ‘all or nothing basis’. They also found that effective leadership teams consist of either the entire leadership group or a sub-group. They highlight five guiding principles for successful senior teams:
1. Define Teams in Terms of Performance Opportunities
Katzenbach and Smith believe that senior teams should not make forming a team the primary objective. Instead, they should focus on forming specific performance objectives that necessitate efficient, cohesive, teamwork.
2. Assigning Team Members on the Basis of Skills, Not Status
Katzenbach and Smith also advocate that once objectives for the senior team have been developed, the team must be assembled on the basis of competencies, rather than status within the organization. Obviously, this should be done with specific performance targets and the team objectives in mind.
3. Choose Leaders on the Basis of Attitudes and Beliefs, Not Seniority or Position
One of the main myths associated with senior teams is that they should be led by the CEO. Katzenbach and Smith believe that the CEO needn’t be the first choice for management team leadership and that seniority is irrelevant. Often, the CEO represents the best choice, but what is relevant is that the senior team leader should have a deep belief in the overall purpose of the team and the skills of the individual team members.
4. Enforce Regular Team Discipline on All Would be Teams
Effective senior teams must also have a sense of ownership for their results. Even though the accountability of senior teams is particularly difficult to realize, it is possible through observing business results indirectly and ensuring that each member has a strong sense of ownership for results.
5. Recognize the Value, as Well as the Limits, of the ‘Working Group’ Approach
Katzenbach and Smith found that most effective leadership teams in larger organizations start life as a working group, with sub groups moving into ‘team mode’ when the need arises, either as a one-off or as part of an ongoing process. This ensures that the leadership groups regularly, and consciously, address the needs of the teams and work groups.
References[1] Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
[2] Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, ‘Teams at the Top’, The McKinsey Quarterly Number 1, (1994).
