Teams at the Top

In one of his several brilliant studies of leadership, Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis examines high-performance teams such as those associated with the Disney studios (which created the first full-length animation film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), the Manhattan Project, Xerox's PARC, and Lockheed's "Skunk Works." But if your own organization has few (if any) geniuses, what are the best strategies for unleashing the potential of both collaborative teamwork and individual leadership? Katzenbach is himself the author or co-author of a number of brilliantly conceived and executed studies, notably The Wisdom of Teams and Real Change Leaders. In this book, his central thesis is that "an integrated balance of real team, individual, and single-leader working group performance is both possible and desirable at the top -- not that one mode is intrinsically better than the other." The key phrase is "integrated balance." Whatever the size and nature of your organization, Katzenbach offers "three major messages":1. The best senior leadership groups are rarely a true team at the top -- although they can and do function as real teams when major, unexpected events prompt that behavior.2. Most of the team members can optimize their performance as a group by consciously working to obtain a better balance between their team and non-team efforts -- rather than by trying to become an ongoing single team.3. The secret to better balance lies in learning to integrate the discipline required for team performance with the discipline of executive (single-leader) behavior -- not in replacing one with the other.This third "message" is especially relevant to smaller companies, probably privately-owned, in which the CEO (the archetypical single-leader) is either the founder or related to the founder. In such companies, the need for an "integrated balance" may be even greater than it is for much larger organizations. Katzenbach organizes his material within nine chapters. Rather than list their titles, I have selected a few key passages which, hopefully, will suggest the potential value of this book to you and your own organization's specific needs and interests.Executive Leadership Discipline requires an individual to "create and maintain urgency, resolve the critical strategic issues, enforce individual accountability, leverage executive time, make the tough decisions individually, pick the best individuals for the key jobs, and periodically raise the bar." (Chapter One)"The notion of `leadership capacity' implies a system of leadership, if you will, that can extract leadership wisdom, insight, and behaviors from many more individuals. [This is obviously essential to concensus-building.] Thus it fuels the continuing search for different kinds of leadership approaches, both individual and joint, at all levels of the organization." (Chapter Three)Team Leadership Discipline requires members to "create a meaningful purpose, commit to a team performance goals, be mutually