The perfect leader is a myth. In fact, the future of leadership is in the collective, says Peter Hawkins – and this is where team coaching fits in

The concept of the perfect CEO or leader is found in many organisations, sports teams and even in politics. We expect more and more from our leaders. We invest such hope in their power to ‘turn things round’. But perfect leaders are a myth, and we are quick to criticise when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations.

When I started work with the senior executive team of a leading financial company, I was struck by how the views of the team were focused on what was wrong with their current chief executive. The company had had a number of chairmen and chief executives with short tenures and there had been intense competition before the latest (internal) appointment.

After a few months of working alongside them, I was still being lobbied about the CEO’s weaknesses. At the next meeting I said: “I am fed up with you all telling me what is wrong with your chief executive.”

The chief executive looked at me with shock and anger and the team members all looked down at their papers.

I continued: “I think you are all delegating leadership upwards, and playing the game of ‘waiting for the perfect chief executive’. Well, I have some bad news for you. In all my years working with a great variety of organisations, I have never met a perfect chief executive. So the question for you as senior team members is: ‘How are you as a team going to take responsibility for his weaknesses?'”

Coaching boards or senior teams running a business is very different from coaching most other teams. While running it they are also focusing on transforming it and its wider system. It’s about collective transformational leadership.

This is the process of collectively engaging the commitment and participation of all major stakeholder groups to radical change in the context of shared endeavour, values and vision. The stakeholder groups at a minimum include employees, customers or service users, suppliers or partners, investors or voters, regulators, the communities in which the enterprise takes place and the natural environment.

This activity can’t be done by an individual or by a group of individuals acting in parallel. Nor is it about allocating individual responsibility where the financial director looks after the investors, HR director, employees, sales director, customers, etc. This can lead to systemic and stakeholder conflict being enacted in the leadership team or the boardroom.

A senior team can have too much conflict to be effective, but it can also have too little. The level of conflict in a team should be no greater or no less than the conflict in the system they are leading and operating within. Team coaching needs to help teams (and boards) expand their collective capacity to manage systemic conflict.

Teams have so much more potential than individuals to rise to the growing challenges that face all organisations and countries, but need support to become more than the sum of their parts.

Coaching has been the fastest growing component of leadership development over the past 10 years. Yet only a small percentage of this is team coaching, on top of which it is often confused with team building, facilitation, awaydays and process consulting.

Research conducted by Wageman and colleagues (Senior Leadership Teams, Harvard Business School Press, 2008), with 120 leadership teams found that “teams do not improve markedly even if all their members receive individual coaching to develop their personal capabilities. Team development is not an additive function of individuals becoming more effective team players, but rather an entirely different capability.”

The growing interest in team coaching has come from a realisation of the limits of what can be achieved through individual coaching and leadership development, which can help create strong individual leaders but leave unaligned, poorly functioning leadership teams untouched.

The journey from being an effective team to being a high-performing transformational leadership team is challenging and demanding, but we must beware of replacing the myth of the super-hero leader with the myth of the super-team.

Give me five

Five core disciplines are needed to deliver collective transformational leadership.

For a team to be successful it needs clear commissioning. This includes a clear purpose and defined success criteria by which the performance of the team will be assessed. Then the team must clarify its own mission, including purpose, goals and objectives, core values, ways of working, roles and expectations and, importantly, a compelling vision for success.

Living this is a different challenge. The team needs to constantly co-create together so the mission has a beneficial influence on performance. The team must then connect outside to engage staff and stakeholders and transform relationships that drive improvements in the organisation.

At the centre of the model is core learning that sits in the middle and above the other four. This is the place where the team stands back and reflects on its own performance in order to consolidate the learning for the next cycle of engagement.

Take stock

The high-performing leadership team needs to be effective in all five of these disciplines. Although there is clearly an implied progression for moving through these disciplines, they are a continuous cycle and there is a constant dialogue between them. So, as is often the case, if the commissioning is not clear the team needs to have a dialogue between creating their own mission and getting buy-in and agreement from stakeholders.

A high-performing leadership team takes time out to take stock, reflect on the patterns within and between disciplines and learn more about their own team functioning both internally and externally.

Great teams are those that know exactly what is required and have a passion for their collective purpose – where there is keen interest in each other’s successes, setbacks and learning and a real sense of partnership between the team and with the board and stakeholders.

This does not occur by happenstance. It occurs when the five disciplines are in place, connected and in balance.

Team coaching needs to be able to work with all five of these disciplines, each of which requires a different team coaching approach, as well as a team coach who can connect the personal, interpersonal, group, organisation and wider system and business dynamics and help the team not only become high performing but create greater value for the system they serve.

l?Professor Peter Hawkins founded the Bath Consultancy Group (BCG). He and John Leary-Joyce are leading the second training in ‘Systemic Team Coaching’ run by BCG and the Academy of Executive Coaching.

For more information go to:
www.aoec.com

Reader offer

Leadership Team Coaching – Developing Collective Transformational Leaders by Peter Hawkins, was published in April 2011 by Kogan Page Ltd.

We are pleased to offer readers of Coaching at Work a 20 per cent discount on the price of £24.99. Please call Taryn Sachs at Kogan Page on 0207 843 1957 or email tsachs@koganpage.com

Payment can be made by credit card over the phone.

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 3