The Fundamentals of Team Leadership

 
What does it take to put together a winning team in business?

Volumes of articles and books have been written on the topic over the years, offering advice on how to avoid the dysfunction that often renders teams ineffective. We have all been part of groups that failed, either because of hidden agendas or personalities that didn’t quite mesh.

In my experience as an executive and a consultant, I’ve come to believe the personal style of team members has the greatest influence on a group’s success. More important than any technical skill a team member brings is the ability to work closely together, free of backbiting and political maneuvering. The key is having the right mix on your team.

 
The Four Types of Employee
By and large, there are four archetypes of people in companies: magicians, warriors, sovereigns, and lovers. You can easily define them using the Jungian framework introduced by psychologist Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette.

 
Magicians. They are the rational yet imaginative souls in your organization. They think a new idea or insight is the only thing that can move the world. In truth, they’re obsessed by ideas. Their answer to feeding the troops is to pull a rabbit out of a hat. These types of people think a mere argument over an idea equals action.

 
Lovers. For them, everything comes down to human relations. They’re pragmatic but emotional. They focus on building the winning coalition. They are obsessed not by ideas but by feelings. They consider agreement an action.

 
Sovereigns. They are the emotional and imaginative types. They focus on the big picture and judge everything on whether it leads to where they want to go. They redefine what people consider is possible. They are obsessed by beliefs. And they consider direction a form of action.

 
Warriors. They are rational and pragmatic. They’re focused on the next battle and can only see clearly what’s directly in front of them. They hold people accountable to systems and the fairness of those systems. They’re obsessed by facts. For them, action is finding the critical factor to get something immediately accomplished.

 
Apple’s Steve Jobs is clearly a magician. Watching him introduce a new product on stage (BusinessWeek.com, 7/6/07) is like watching a master magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, with all his competitive juice to dominate his industry, is a warrior. IBM’s (IBM) Tom Watson, who plastered the walls of Big Blue with “Think” signs, was a magician. Could anyone think of GE’s Jack Welch (BusinessWeek.com, 12/7/07) as anything other than a warrior? Indeed, one of the most fascinating campaigns in all of business is the attempt by Welch’s successor to transform a warrior company like GE into a hothouse of ideas. Jeff Immelt, whose “imagination at work” vision for GE is an extreme departure from the Welch years, will have a hard time of it without more magicians on his senior team.

 
Maintaining the Balance
Obviously, this framework is a simplification, but there are logical implications for any leader assembling a team. The most effective teams maintain a balance by having a healthy variety of types in key roles because each type is good at doing different things. A mix of magicians, warriors, lovers, and sovereigns will get you the best team possible.

 
When one type dominates, friction and conflict can occur: a fall-off of creativity, a lack of flexibility, risk aversion, and paralysis. That’s why the most effective leaders know who they are and surround themselves with people who complement their strengths and offset their weaknesses. The warrior needs a magician, a sovereign, and a few lovers. What often happens in organizations is you get a group of warriors, and they don’t like the magicians so you don’t have any of them on your team.

 
Clearly, there is beauty in balance. That is the place where individual team members become more sensitive to each other’s needs. Too many magicians and your team will be pondering opportunities all the time, but will lack decisive action, even though the thinking will be excellent. Why? Because magicians are more concerned with having it done “right,” rather than having it done. They’re especially vulnerable to pursuing superior technology at the expense of something that customers would buy. And a group of them in a room will look more like a debating society than a high performance team. Too many lovers and you have another set of problems. These employees value consensus to the detriment of results. They hold far too many meetings. They do too much talking and not enough acting. The lover excessively relies on outside advice and often appears to lack both competitiveness and edge.

 
The Right Mix for Your Team
Too many warriors, on the other hand, will experience difficulty if anything in the environment changes. They won’t be proactive and will consequently miss opportunities competitors may exploit. They appear as a parade of soldiers, and they can be innovation-challenged. Too many sovereigns will often pull an organization in too many directions at once, or will radically change direction often. Sovereign-dominated teams will have no center of gravity and will keep many unresolved business issues up in the air all the time. They appear fragmented, with poor communication, and they often struggle with strategy and direction.

 
That said, some companies require a predominance of one type or another to effectively pursue certain strategies or values. Magicians are the best fit for innovation-based companies in which discovery is crucial to success. Warriors are ideally suited for highly competitive environments that demand a conquering-the-world mindset.

 
Do you have the right mix on your team?

With Richard Rawlinson and Simon Gilles, vice-presidents at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Originally published in Business Week Online on December 20, 2007

Also, listen to my podcast interview iwth Business Week Executive Editor John A. Byrne

Winston Churchill & The Concept of a Campaign

Inspiring your team to wage a campaign—whether it be to save the free world or improve competitiveness—is a key leadership tool

 
One of the greatest campaigners in history is surely Sir Winston Churchill. With his soaring rhetoric and steely tenacity, he inspired the British to believe they could win World War II, and he convinced an isolationist U.S. to mobilize against Adolf Hitler and sell, lend, and lease its arms.

 
Churchill, of course, is one of history’s greatest leaders. There are few of us who could ever match his way with words or hope that our words could bring about the dramatic consequences that his did. But both campaigns—the one at home and the one abroad—were won by his oratory and relationship-building skills. They remain the quintessential case studies of influence and power in leadership.

 
Achievable Targets
I’m not going to even pretend that you can be a Churchill in your company. But the notion of waging a campaign as opposed to heading a project or an initiative is a powerful one in and of itself. The word alone lends importance and credibility to an effort. It elevates that effort in a way that allows and encourages more people to rally around a cause quickly. And the word “campaign” conveys the sometimes grueling nature of what it takes to win something of substance—gaining significant market share against a rival, launching a new breakthrough product, leading a total transformation of a company.

 
Campaigns turn purpose into action, concentrating people’s efforts on what can be done and turning those efforts into results; that is the essence of leadership. Campaigns are sequences of actions—not a single decision or a project—designed to produce clearly defined objectives within specified time frames and with specified resources. These targets are achievable, specific and limited but have strategic significance.

 
A campaign can be directed toward fixing a hole when something is broken, making a U-turn when a change of direction is required, or simply staying on top of your game. A campaign is a form of guided improvisation, held together by a theme as opposed to an action plan. And a series of campaigns, executed in a concerted way, can lead to complete transformation of an organization.

 
In any campaign, the leader’s first job is to get his colleagues to think about and decide what the company or unit is to do. For example, companies have to defend or create competitive advantage. How to defend an advantage may be obvious. But a company’s advantage can change over time without its managers fully appreciating it. Then a campaign may be needed to analyze and identify the “active ingredient”—the advantage. This is the thinking part of leadership.

 
Rallying the Troops
The leader’s second job is to get his colleagues to understand and support the organization’s task. Leaders should not aim to indoctrinate employees but should instead draw upon a shared sense of purpose. A poor attempt to mimic Churchill will do more harm than good. As a leader you should remain authentic to yourself, using what skills you have. Every now and then top executives will need to sponsor a campaign to develop or refine the company’s brand or identity. This is the inspirational part of leadership.

 
The leader’s third job is to recruit and develop people for the campaign and to deploy them in the right roles. Three quarters of large employers readily admit that they are not successful in recruiting highly talented people or effectively identifying the best and weakest performers, according to a study by Towers Perrin, the human resources firm. Allocating people to roles should be a negotiation rather than simply an administrative exercise. The real issue is always how much commitment and energy an individual will bring to a role and how well he and his immediate colleagues will work together. This is the mobilization component of leadership.

 
Equipping Your Team
And finally, a leader’s job is to equip people to perform their tasks for a campaign. That often involves curing some defect, from unclear accountability to poor information design, giving the troops the assets and the resources they need to win. This is the “equip” part of leadership. A campaign should be reasonably short, typically between three and six months, with an absolute maximum of a year. You want to make sure a campaign target doesn’t become out of date and that all the players can focus for the entire period of the campaign.

 
All campaigns are not created equal. When trying to get out of a hole, a leader has to first engage in a thinking campaign and then he or she must inspire. Once successful, the leader has to redefine the possible and then mobilize the organization to build capabilities matching its new ambitions. When things aren’t working out, a U-turn may be needed. More often than not, U-turns start with a restructuring or a shake-up of the senior leadership team.

 
As Churchill once said, “We have before us a great opportunity, a golden opportunity, glittering bright but short-lived. Our chance is now at hand. The chance is there; the cause is there, the man is there.” Remind your team that they have a chance to seize whatever opportunity is before them.

Originally published in Business Week Online on January 22, 2008

A Leader’s Real Job Description

Jack Welch has his “4E” framework for what makes for a great leader: positive energy, ability to energize others, edge to summon the courage to make tough decisions, and ability to execute. The Welch framework is just one of many in the leadership literature. Leadership gurus from Warren Bennis to Ram Charan have their own well-known and well-advanced formulas.

 
I humbly submit mine here. It may not be as catchy as some of the others, and I make no claims to originality. But it is informed by my experiences as an executive and as a consultant to dozens of global clients in assignments too numerous to mention. And it is the product of much reading, thinking, and agonizing over what it takes to be a great leader. Besides, as a consultant, I feel guilty when I don’t present a framework to help people. A consultant, after all, is not unlike an optician who prescribes a new pair of glasses—or framework—to improve your eyesight.

 
My modest prescription: Every leader should be mindful that the opportunity to effect meaningful change is limited by time. In other words, leaders should always have a time frame in mind. Leaders work against the clock and the calendar. The TIME framework below describes the four essential actions every leader should master. Most important, this framework allows a leader to simultaneously deal with the myriad cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and power plays of the world.

 
Think. Little is more important to leadership than the opportunity for deep reflection. Often, leaders are caught up doing triage at work, reacting to the daily grind of getting the job done, that they fail to set aside time for the proactive work. Thinking is the part of leadership that leads to innovating, discovering a purpose, creating a vision, and choosing a strategic position. It is the most essential part of the job, the part that focuses on the future.

 
Inspire. This is the most visible component of leadership. You’ve heard this before, but probably with an entirely different spin. Of course, the most effective leaders inspire. To use Welch’s word, they energize. But they also sell the vision, act as an example, tell stories, confront reality, ask the right questions, demonstrate possibilities, reassure, and give hope for a bright future. The leader’s job is to make people comfortable with what the company does so they can shape the task themselves in response to changing positions. Then, they can “do strategy with their fingertips,” to borrow Andy Grove’s phrase. Too many people, however, confuse inspiration with feelings. No wonder, because many leadership writers just happen to be real or imaginary psychologists. But inspiration at its core is a spiritual concept, not rooted in psychology. Inspiration is the spirit in you. A spirit is not a sentiment. It helps us redefine what is possible.

 
Mobilize. The leader’s third role is to mobilize people to perform a task. Every leader must be able to move a team to action, to build coalitions, define campaigns, set targets, and encourage networks. Unlike inspiring, which is typically directed at large numbers of people, mobilizing requires leaders to engage with and influence key players and their specific contributions. The skill to mobilize people is nearly equal to the skill to manage the politics and neutralize opponents. You have to clear the way for action to occur.

 
Empower. Leaders get most things done through others, so execution depends on managing authority correctly and delegating power generously. And part of this task involves allocating resources, scrutinizing and overseeing the deployment of those assets, and disempowering those who misuse them. People have to be equipped to perform their tasks. Assets have to be acquired and deployed. The overall organization has to be designed.

 
Thinking about what we do in all four dimensions is a passport to great leadership. But it’s also important to say clearly that leadership is ineffective or flawed largely when someone is unbalanced on some or all of these dimensions. The best leaders must operate on all four levels.

With Ivan de Suza and Gregor Vogelsang, vice-presidents at Booz Allen Hamilton.

Originally published in Business Week Online on December 26, 2007