Jody Gold believes most leadership development efforts either grow individuals or build teams. Successful organizations need both.
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In 2014, corporations in the United States spent over $70 Billion dollars on training and development. More of this money was spent on Management and Leadership Development than anything else, over 35%. Fears that corporations don’t have enough quality leadership remain the top concern of business and HR leaders.
A big problem is that most approaches to leadership development treat leadership as a set of abilities that live in individuals, or as a phenomenon that emerges through the network of relationships that exist between team members.
Building the leadership capacity organizations need requires both growing people as leaders and developing the conditions where this phenomenon of shared emergent leadership arises. Most leadership development focuses on one or the other, when they need to build both together, as a whole.
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What Doesn’t Work
Traditional leadership development focuses on developing the individual. Max Shkud, one of my favorite thinkers about organizations, explains that this doesn’t work because it operates on the old assumption that, “leaders are heroic figures who ‘lead people into battle’ by developing brilliant strategies and driving execution to deliver business results.” This kind of leadership development uses instruments and models that help people understand themselves and their co-workers better—but it fails to build the relational infrastructure that turn collections of great people into great teams.
On the other side of the coin are relational approaches that emphasize a ‘one team’ mindset, but fail to adequately engage and get value from the differences and diversity of their individuals. Many of us have participated in team-building events, which often oversimplify the inherent complexity of building systems within which shared leadership can thrive not only during the exercise, but back in the office.
Still other approaches to leadership development see teams and even organizations as living systems—self-adapting, self-repairing, self-improving. In systems development, leadership is a participatory, collective process that emerges through a network of relationships the way it does in great jazz. Music takes shape around the ideas proposed by individuals tuned to one another in the moment. Leadership becomes direction as long as it grooves.
Great jazz ensembles often play together for years. Members trust each other enough to lead and to follow, to take risks, explore, and execute together with precision.
Systems approaches to leadership development seek to accelerate building the conditions jazz players may take years to develop organically. The shortcoming of these approaches is that they often oversimplify the complexity of how people relate to each other, power, and leadership. The strongest teams transcend, but also include the different ideas, insights, and strengths of their members. That’s what makes groups smarter than individuals.
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Capacity Through Connection
I’ll share my own challenge in writing this piece as an example of how intelligence emerges through connection. My dad called me on the phone a few minutes ago. I told him I feel like I’m in high school again, stressed about a paper that’s due the next day; trying too hard to sound smart. Somehow, connecting with this man that I admire so much, and whose brilliance is a part of the reason I sometimes doubt my own value, settled my nerves. I have greater access to my creative gifts when I am connected to others than when I am trying to impress them.
Similar dynamics occur in work teams. Our capacity to take risks, ask for help, or assume leadership is limited by the thinnest connection we have with a member of our team. A team is only as strong as its weakest link. The weakest link is not a person; it’s the most restricted conduit through which information, influence, and knowledge can flow.
For a team to act like a smart adaptive organism, a living system, imagine each person on that team with their different strengths, as a muscle. The network of relationships between each pair is the connective tissue—the ligaments and tendons. Muscles pull on ligaments and tendons to move bones. Bodies can only deliver consistent power if the connective tissue is strong enough and flexible enough to handle the forces that are applied through them.
There are many ways the connective tissue between specific pairs of people in teams can form poorly or get damaged. Wendy may believe Judy took credit for her work. Wendy is guarded on the team. She hoards information and resources. Mark has an unresolved grudge against Jonathan that prevents him from hearing the value in Jonathan’s ideas. Weak connections impact performance as surely as injuries to bodies do.
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Build People, Build Living Systems
Recognizing that leadership capacity lives not just within individuals on teams but through the quality of their connections to one another, is easier than actually creating the conditions that allow teams to identify, repair, and enlarge the number and capacity of those connections.
Here’s a loose recipe to cultivate the system-wide consciousness and relational infrastructure that multiply a team’s ability to flex, breathe, push back, or pull hard together to reach their goals.
- Answer the ‘why’ question about the advantages teams build when they intentionally and explicitly fill in the connections between each member and every other.
- Facilitate teams to attend to and grow these connections, in service of the performance of the whole.
- Build connection and curiosity by talking about what lights us up at work and in our lives.
- Develop the capability of team members to talk directly to one another in the open, in the eyes and ears of the whole. This is a departure from the conditioning of ‘taking things offline’, gossiping in the parking lot, or avoiding the curiosity, affection, or challenge of what’s in the pipes between us. Yet it’s easy to model, teach, and practice and it makes an immediate difference.
- Give each other authentic appreciative feedback about specific behavior and its impact.
- Enable everyone to track and discuss the roles people on their teams play. As the patterns of system behavior come into focus, so do the results of those patterns. Awareness grows the desire and capability to change and improve.
- Grow the capacity to give ‘differentiating feedback’ in connection with each other, and in the open. Teams can clear the blocks that limit connection, intelligence, and performance.
We are speaking the language of more effective and fulfilling teams. Let’s hear your voice. When you’ve been on a team that was tuned well enough to each other and your goals that leadership emerged like jazz, what happened as a result?
Photo credit: Flickr/Pedro Ribeiro Simões
Leadership development doesn’t work because it is how you play the game that gets you to the top even if it means you leave dead bodies and ruin companies to do so. There is also a cultural attitude that the boss is the boss and if you don’t like it too bad. You need to read Edward Denming’s books about leadership. In addition, workers are treated as expandable items.