Leading Teams - Richard Hackman

The by line goes like this - 'setting the stage for great performances'. It's all about creating conditions for the right performances. The fundamental reason why there is so much focus on effective team work is that teams can perform large asks and more meaningful tasks than by single individuals. Richard says that teams can create magic - but normally they don't because the conditions are not right.

'The leaders main task is to get a team established on a good trajectory and then to make small adjustments along the way to help members succeed - not to try to continuously manage team behavior in real time. It is about creating conditions that increase its chances of success.'

According to Hackman there are are five performance enhancing conditions

- Having a real team
- setting a compelling direction
- having an enabling team structure
-having a supportive organisational context
- providing expert team coaching

'With superb leadership teams discover new and better ways of working together and individuals find personal learning and fulfillment. Effective work teams operate in ways that build shared commitment, collective skills and appropriate coordination strategies (not mutual antagonism and traits of failures). Group experience contributes to learning and personal well being of individual team members.

The criteria for team effectiveness are

1) team product acceptable to client (performing to potential, winning - in sports)
2) growth in team capability
3) group experience is meaningful and satisfying for members 

Leadership is creating conditions that increase its chances of evolving into an effective performing unit.

What's a Real team
What differentiates a real team versus a set of individuals are these 

- Team Task
- Clear boundaries
who is on the team/ who is not
is it under bounded or over bounded
is membership and team identity clear
- Clearly specified authority
is it being underused or over used
are they manager-led teams (manager sets overall direction) or are they self-managed teams  (teams deign team and its organisational context, monitor and manage work process and progress and execute the task)
- membership stability over a period of time
reasonably stable teams perform better, they have a shared mental model, familiarity, shared knowledge, team stability makes excellent leadership possible

A real team has the right size, considerable life and a close context

Setting a Compelling Direction

Leader's direction is clear, engaging, challenging and offers choice (invites them to join and bring their talents)

Effective team self-management is impossible unless someone in authority sets direction for the team's work. It energises the team, orients attention and action and engages their talents. leaders must understand that people seek purpose and meaning in what they do and how they live. When leaders articulate a set of aspirations that elevate our purposes or deepen the meaning we find in our lives, motivational juices flow.

Here the leader's dilemma about how to instruct teams on going about their work is - do we specify ends or do we specify means? Hackman gives a brilliant matrix with ends on one axis and means on another and clearly the one where the leader specifies ends and not the means is the one that works. I remember an old quote - tell your team what to do and not how to do it and they will surprise you!

Four scenarios

- Don't specify means and ends - results in anarchy
- specify ends but not means - self-managed, goal oriented work
- specify means but no ends - wasted resources
- specify means and ends - team gets turned off, worst scenario   

 Apart from scenario two, it will result in significant performance problems and substantial under utilisation of resources

When ends are specified but means are not - team members are able to and encouraged to draw on their full complement of knowledge, skill and experience in designing and executing a way of operating that is well-tuned to team's purpose and circumstance.  One must only take care to specify the outer limits of team discretion.

However setting direction involves execution of authority. Its an inherently anxiety-arousing activity. Team members either trust or rebel when authority is exercised. Hackman says that 'to create and maintain an appropriate partitioning of authority between managers and teams requires that anxieties be managed rather than minimised and that people are willing to live with uncertainties and ambiguities as they seek to create a work system that works. Few leadership choices are more consequential for the long term well-being of teams than those that address the partitioning of managers and teams. It takes knowledge, emotional maturity and perseverance.'

Hackman specifies the Trade Offs in Setting Direction
1) how to be clear and complete in specifying purpose (balance between giving too little and being unclear and abstract and giving too much which makes them less involved and makes them not take ownership, a good direction statement has both specificity and a little fuzz around the edges)

2) how challenging should the performance target be (the maximum motivation is when you have a 50% chance of success, leaders who succeed in establishing just the right amount of challenge for task-performing teams invariably are those who have taken the trouble to get to know their team's well)

3) how best to align the direction of the team with broader organisational purpose   

 Leaders must be a leader and a follower. Setting direction is about exercise of authority and a release of energy.

Enabling Structure
Structure like authority is neither good nor bad for team work. The best structures provide members with a solid platform on which to carry out their collective work but also leave lots of room for them to develop their own unique ways of operating. Ideally don't specify too much, but put basic structures for team effectiveness and minimise organisational obstacles

Design of work for teams 

People are either internally motivated for individual performance or externally motivated. People have internal motivation when they view their work as meaningful and feel personally responsible for work outcomes and receive trustworthy knowledge of the results of their efforts. 

Internal Motivation is possible when
- given a meaningful task
- given full responsibility for work
- knowledge of results is immediate and trustworthy

When we assign the entire task to a team and give members the responsibility, it has significant increase in meaningfulness of the work. The downside of this is social loafing where members do not give their best and elan on others work. Leaders must watch for signs of motivational slippage and seek opportunities to help members develop and sustain high shared motivation.

One must understand that team members usually have a better understanding of the demands and opportunities in their immediate work situation than do the managers and engineers who lay down standard work procedures.

Feedback makes team learning possible - team members feel psychologically safe to explore reasons for team successes and failures (team feedback better individual feedback)

For a team to become a self-correcting unit it needs

- a stable team
- feedback 
- well coached team

Norms of conduct
leaders to specify norms of conduct or behaviors which are acceptable and unacceptable - reinforce whats acceptable and sanction what's not. Two core norms are 1) to be proactive 2) identify behaviors to do and not to do. Can have secondary norms to support primary norms.

Let team sizes not be more than 6. Watch out for process losses which affect the performance (performance + potential - process loss). Don't make them too homogeneous or heterogeneous. 

With individual players, harvest their contributions with minimum risk to the team.

Supportive Context

Teams need a reward system which recognises and reinforces good behaviors and is contingent on excellent team performances. Rewards are better than punishment to shape behavior. The consequences of excellent team performance must be something that team members themselves view as favorable.Leaders must find ways to reward and reinforce good performing teams.

For that these three conditions must apply
- team members must understand what is wanted and rewarded
- trustworthy indicators of the degree to which desired outcome has been achieved
- members must perceive they have leverage on the attainment of outcomes, that their collective behaviors shapes the outcomes

It is for the leader/manager to find ways to directly link team behaviors to team outcomes. Ideally do not rely exclusively on intrinsic or extrinsic rewards but instead structure the work itself to foster internal motivations and then support that positive motivation with performance contingent extrinsic rewards. Verbal reinforcement is certainly a must.

Training must be provided for teams when members are not sufficiently knowledgeable or skilled.

Expert Coaching

Coaching opportunities occur at the beginning, at midpoint and at the end. Well timed coaching is like preventive maintenance
- launch meeting (beginning) - motivational
- feedback (midpoint) - strategy - consultative
-analysis (end) - knowledge and skill - educational

The three aspects of group interaction that shape effectiveness are

- amount of effort members apply
- performance strategies applied
- level of knowledge and skill they apply

When conditions are favorable coaching can significantly enhance team performance.
Effort 
- Process loss - social loafing
- Process gain - high shared commitment to team and its work

Performance strategy 
- Process loss - mindless reliance on habitual routines
- Process gain - invention of innovative, task-appropriate work procedures

Knowledge and skill
- Inappropriate weighting of member contributions
- sharing of knowledge and development of member skills 

Beginning - task examined and redefined, norms of conduct specified tried and owned
Mid point - performance strategy coaching helps them stay closely
Ending - team sharing requires some protected time and a moderate level of collective safety, get team to generate and discuss explanations for performance

Keep an eye out for excellent team procedures and reinforce them (compliments, wine bottles, movie tickets). Interventions are all about timing - ill timed interventions harm.

Don't need to emphasise on harmony.

Leadership

Effective Leader Traits

- Knows some things
- Knows how to do some things
- has emotional maturity for the role
- has a measure of personal courage

What it takes

- Be prepared
- Lying in wait - don't force

Leading teams is about creating conditions that maximises chance of success, not finding causes.

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It's one of the most comprehensive works on  leading teams and I am glad I invested in it. As always I have used certain lines straight out of the book because they are so well articulated. I will go through it all once again and reinforce my understanding of these concepts. For anyone leading any kind of team activity, its a must read.