Great business teams build a playbook that helps them succeed in their context. Like Take6, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, and the San Antonio Spurs under Greg Popovich, they have a style that they use most of the time. But they also know how to shift to a different mode when the context changes.
Most leadership teams adopt their style by accident and end up with wasteful meetings and unnecessarily noise and conflict. In this episode, Peter and Richard share an approach for figuring out the right kind of leadership team style for you based on your context. They describe the tools that fit each style and when your team might shift from one to another, drawing lessons from great music groups and sports teams.
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Episode Transcription
Peter Green
Take6 is the greatest a capella group of all time. And I’m happy to debate that point with any of our audience that cares to, but let’s be honest, I’ll probably win that debate. I was recently listening to a song from their first album, and on that song, they do this really interesting thing in the middle. Take6 has a very jazz influenced style, but for two measures of this song, they shift gears completely to a very traditional hymn singing style, then immediately back out of it. I’ll play a clip of that here so you can hear it. As you listen, notice how different it sounds when they sing the lyrics “Rock of Ages.”
Richard Lawrence
That shift is a bit of a musical inside joke, but it’s a demonstration of a capability that we’ve noticed in not just great music groups but in all kinds of teams. They are able to shift styles and approaches when they need to, to accomplish a specific outcome.
Peter
This happens in sports a lot with great teams as well. Like, I’m a big basketball fan. I think of the 1991 Bulls with Michael Jordan who were kind of a high-flying, fast paced offense; and then they were playing Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” Lakers in the 1991 finals, and in game two they completely shifted their approach to be really deliberately defensive, and a slower offensive pace. The San Antonio Spurs did kind of the opposite shift in 2014– they were kind of known to have a really methodical, slow offense; but in order to beat Labron James and the Miami heat in 2014, they went to this fast paced, pass the ball around, move the ball quickly approach. Both of those teams ended up winning the championship. And so, they were able to shift out of that default mode in order to win the championship that year.
Richard
Great business teams do this too. They build a playbook that helps them succeed in their context. Like Take6, Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, and the San Antonio Spurs under Greg Popovich, they have a style that they use most of the time. But they also know how to shift to a different mode when the context changes.
Peter
Today, we’re going to describe the four most common styles of a leadership team, what context might cause a team to pick that style, some tools or plays that those types of teams need to do that style well, and what to do if you need to shift.
Richard
In the book Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman and her coauthors describe 4 different kinds of leadership teams that a CEO might pull together. As we’ve worked with a range of leadership teams, mostly peer to peer rather than formed by a CEO, we realized that their taxonomy works for all kinds of leadership teams as a way to fit the team style to the context.
Peter
For example, some teams of leaders are in a context where their work, their decision-making, is naturally decoupled and independent. One example of that would be different business units within a larger holding company.
Richard
Some teams of leaders are in a context where their work is decoupled but has a larger shared purpose and some sense of being in it together. Like, separate product lines under a common brand that go after the same target market.
Peter
Other teams of leaders have areas of responsibility that have more dependencies between them, but those dependencies are predictable. What Cynefin would call “complicated.” Perhaps different functional departments staying aligned during an organization-wide technology change.
Richard
Finally, some teams of leaders have a complex and interdependent relationship between them. We often see this with leadership teams who are together responsible for formulating and executing a shared business strategy.
Peter
That first context, where things are decoupled and independent, suggests a need for what Wageman would call an Informational leadership team. We often call this an Info Sharing team to put the focus on what the team does.
The primary goal here is to promote transparency across the group or the organization, so these teams focus on clear and efficient communication. They’re not making decisions together. They’re not seeking advice. They’re just making other leaders aware of information that might be relevant to them.
The playbook for an Info Sharing team includes written and visual artifacts like reports and dashboards, with meetings structured to ensure clarity and alignment about what the information is and how it’s being interpreted. These capabilities are important for any successful team, so we think of this set of tools as kind of a foundational mode.
Richard
If you’re in the second context, where work is decoupled but there’s a larger shared purpose, especially if trust between leaders is high, the right mode for that team is what Wageman calls a Consultative team. We often refer to this as an Advice Seeking team, again putting the emphasis on what the team does.
Peter
We also kind of struggle to say and spell “consultative,” so, that’s another reason…
Richard
Ya. I think I actually just said “consultative.” [Richard emphasizes the first and third syllables.]
So, to that point, the primary goal with this kind of team in this mode is to support other leaders in making better decisions. So these teams use structures like the advice process, or our own Reviewing Work in Process agenda to provide advice and opinions to other team members. This kind of team still requires a lot of info sharing– as Peter said, info sharing is the foundational mode– but the focus here is on not just sharing info but using it to get input towards making better decisions.
Peter
Then, when large efforts require work that spans multiple teams or departments, leadership teams often shift to a Coordination mode.
This is the native realm for traditional project management, so teams will need plays from that space to be successful. Things like plans, and commitments, and accountability loops, and then, effective tools to change plans when something unexpected happens. Those are the key moves when we’re in a coordination style of a leadership team.
Richard
And then, finally, some leadership teams are structured to make good decisions together and to communicate them well in the organization and sometimes beyond. This mode requires the strongest teamwork of the four different modes, since good decisions require psychological safety, debate, and effective structures to make the best possible decision in the right timeframe, and then to communicate it effectively. See our episode on the 3ID pattern for some tips on how to communicate about decisions well.
We often facilitate Leadership Team Launches especially for this kind of team, helping them align around a shared purpose, get clear on roles, establish working agreements, and build an initial leadership team backlog.
Peter
Whichever context fits your leadership team, the first move is to agree on your “default” mode, what you need most often. Then, optimize your playbook to do it well. If you’re not sure which fits, we’d be happy to talk with you. You can visit the contact page on [humanizingwork.com] (http://humanizingwork.com/) and reach out, and we’re happy to help you think through that.
Richard
Once you settle into your leadership team’s default mode, you may find that the context changes to no longer fit that mode.
For example, your info sharing team might realize that now you need to align more when a new cross-department initiative comes up. OK, it’s time to shift to the Coordination mode, which probably means different tools, maybe different meetings, perhaps even adjustments to the team composition and roles.
Peter
Or what was a collaborative decision-making team might no longer need to be, as you finish some big, complex initiative and more back to business-as-usual. Perhaps you shift then to an Advice Seeking mode to still benefit from each other’s input but to reduce the overhead as things become more decoupled.
Richard
Often, leaders belong to multiple teams at once, each of which operates with different modes. There might be a larger info sharing team with every department head on it. And then, a few of those leaders might be part of another collaborative decision-making team for an initiative that spans their areas of responsibility.
Peter
Typically, info sharing is easier to do across a large team, while collaborative decision making is much easier to do with a smaller team, say 3-5 people. So, sometimes we’ll see a small collaborative decision making team that uses a larger Advice Seeking team to help shape the decision, but they keep the decision making authority within that smaller team. Making these roles clear is really important if you’re going to adopt this kind of structure. We see far too many leadership teams where those roles are unclear, and it creates unnecessary noise and conflict.
Richard
Like any mental model, this taxonomy of four types of teams oversimplifies the world a bit to give us better tools to address the inherent complexity of our work. But we invite you to consider which context most closely matches your team, whether that’s decoupled and independent, decoupled with a shared purpose, dependent in a predictable way, or interdependent and complex, and look at which tools from the four team types might help you be more successful as a team.
Peter
Like a great music group or sports team, finding the style that allows you to consistently win, however you define winning, makes work more meaningful, less stressful, and helps you make a bigger positive impact for your organization and the customers you serve.
Thanks for tuning in today.
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