Leadership Wisdom of the Week #16

“The performance of a system depends more on how its parts interact than on how they act independently.”  

– Russell Ackoff, Creating the Corporate Future

Organisations are complex systems with different layers of teams, functions, units, processes, and projects. As leaders, we often focus on ensuring that we have the best people and the best knowledge in our teams. This is important, but as Russell Ackoff reminds us, it is often even more important to ensure that people interact and work together. This requires a shift from individual accountability to shared responsibility for outcomes.

As in sports or the arts, the best stars do not necessarily create the best teams or orchestras. Instead, what matters is how the talents of different individuals are combined, and whether everyone is working towards the same goals. Team players understand that they cannot achieve team or organisational-level targets on their own, and they aim to work in ways that also enable their colleagues to reach their full potential on the way towards those goals.

In order to create true teamwork – systems that genuinely benefit from the interaction between their parts – leaders need to consciously lead team dynamics. The basic starting points for building teams that are more than the sum of their parts are an atmosphere of psychological safety and clear shared goals.

Psychological safety – a shared belief within the team that it is safe to engage in open and honest collaboration – enables everyone to contribute to the joint work. When people do not need to worry about looking silly when asking questions or upsetting someone by expressing different opinions, even a diverse group can function as a true team where everyone has a voice.

A shared goal turns a group of people into a team. For a goal to be truly shared, it needs to be clear to everyone. At its best, it becomes an everyday leadership tool – something the whole team can use to check how their joint work is progressing in relation to the goal.

In addition, it is important to build elements of collaboration into team roles and responsibilities. People work together and help one another when the system requires collaboration to achieve the goals. Instead of individual heroes, leaders should recognise collaboration and contribution to shared outcomes. If we only recognise and reward individual performance, we will get individuals. If we recognise and reward shared responsibility, we will get teams.