In their efforts to ensure the ongoing competitiveness and success of their organizations, developing a well-functioning leadership team is almost the most essential task of a CEO. This recent book from three British academics posits six stages in that process:
Stage 1. Mobilising. This stage involves forming the leadership group around a common objective, promoting creative thinking on how the objective may be achieved, deciding amongst the alternatives, and doing the associated formal planning.
Stage 2. Confrontation. Confrontation over resources, priorities and how (if at all) plans should be changed to address new realities is, say the authors, virtually inevitable. Good leaders understand the issues at stake, draw out the conflicts rather than pretending they don’t exist, and manage the conflicts to ensure they are constructive, not destructive, to achieving the objectives of the group.
Stage 3. Coming together. In this stage a genuine consensus begins to emerge from the seeming chaos of the confrontation state, as the team genuinely believes the goals can be achieved. Deeper working relationships begin to develop, and the individuals in the team become more genuinely supportive of each other’s efforts.
Stage 4. One step forward, two steps back. This stage consists of major elements: the development of a group level process that is workable for the team (and is subsequently taken for granted), and the development of competencies and capabilities in team members as they face the challenges of achieving their objectives. Both of these elements involve the possibility of “one step forward, two steps back” e.g. some team members may find the developing group process personally challenging, and the development of competencies and challenges may reveal shortcomings in the team that need to be addressed.
Stage 5. Behaving as one. This stage is when the team generates positive synergy through coordinated effort. This, of course, is what all CEOs would like to see in their senior management teams from the day of forming the team, but it is the authors’ contention that the previous stages need to be navigated successfully beforehand to get to this point!
Stage 6. Facing the future. Once the desired objectives are within reach, teams face the challenge of drawing on their new-found capabilities to face the future. This involves decisions at both an individual level about ‘lessons learned’ for how similar challenges should be faced, and the commitment to the ongoing development of leadership qualities in all the team members.
Many CEOs, of course, approach leadership in a relatively intuitive/holistic fashion, and a prescriptive/analytical approach such as the authors describe may seem jarring, at least initially. Nonetheless, the book does offer some interesting insights into that most critical of tasks: developing a leadership team. For the importance of the topic alone, the book may offer something to the careful reader.
