I find it interesting that we as a society still value, very highly, command and control in organizations in the form of the heroic individual leader. Exercising power through hierarchy and valuing individual power, so highly, based on rank, feels like an old concept from another time, yet it still seems highly valued today. An example comes to mind - a leader said to me one day, in a meeting with many people, after placing his business card on the table in front of me, see that, it says I’m President - I’ve never been able to work for people like that.
I also find it interesting that at some point it seems like we feel we have gained sufficient knowledge, maybe we get tired, and we begin to protect ourselves and our past status and effectively stop being open to learning. Ever heard someone say, “at my age, I don’t ____ (you can fill in the blank!)
There is so much to learn as things change and there is so much information coming our way. Learning while working probably means we have to keep to a fairly narrow number of topics so that we don’t get overwhelmed or feel like there is no point in trying to continue to learn because there is too much.
There is also much to learn about ourselves and this might be even more overwhelming. Take the way we act, for instance; learning is facilitated, in part, by examining what we intended and what actually happened in an honest and somewhat detached way. If a shift is needed to get a “better” result, then do it a different way next time. If we do this enough times we’ll learn a lot in a short time.
If you’ve been reading my articles over the past couple years, you’ll know that I love great leadership and I’m dedicated to helping people lead differently, collectively and based on values and purpose. And, that’s why I focus on teams, real teams.
General Stanley McChrystal (U.S. Army, Retired), in his book “Team of Teams” takes a number of chapters to explain complicated versus complex. He starts with craftsmen who knew everything about their craft and could adapt it to new situations. He then moves on to the industrial revolution where work was broken down (and still is today) into pieces done by many people that are supposed to reconstitute into a “whole” product or service - like building a complicated automobile or aircraft.
Today, however, in a number of areas of regular life around our planet, systems, not just individual people, are highly dependent on and interrelated with other systems. So a group of many “parts” is related and dependent on another group of many “parts”. A change in any “part” of any group (system) can have an effect that might not be predictable or understood. So it goes that those types of changes today happen quickly and often and are compounded. This gives rise to complexity in everyday life and work - handling “complicated” feels easy after handling complex. And, complexity is better handled by a team.
Couple that complexity with our now narrow learning (or no learning) approach and we can’t hope to keep up. And this is what I feel people may be experiencing and what might be shutting down their will to learn because they can’t learn or stay abreast of it all. So, maybe, the default becomes doing our jobs, doing what we’re told to do, holding the boss accountable and, maybe not moving forward or doing any better and at the same time feeling comfortable.
To me then, a team, where a number of people are learning and staying up-to-date, in many narrow areas, and specialists lead a function or a task within the team, makes a ton of sense. Together, teams can solve more challenges, issues and real problems and drive performance.
If all of the above makes sense to you and it flows, please help me then understand why we value individualistic leadership and individual rewards over and above teams and collective rewards, and are so resistant to forming more real teams where the team:
Share a purpose and values (Kouzes and Posner)
Create performance goals to meet their KPI’s
Build trust through “conversational capacity” (Craig Weber)
Hold each other mutually accountable (Katzenback and Smith)
Have more fun and get more done?
Or, maybe you feel that’s not true!?