Crosby B.C., Bryson J.M. - Leadership for the Common Good (2005)(en)

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mends a multistep process that begins with airing of perspectives on the source or causes of the conflict; it progresses to examination of underlying assumptions and expression of feelings about the conflict, then focuses on option building, and finally moves on to development of an action plan (Crosby, Bryson, and Anderson, 2003).

Oval Mapping

Another method of helping team members freely share and explain their ideas for accomplishing a task or resolving problems is the oval mapping technique described in Resource B. The technique can be used to help a team or organization decide on strategies, goals, missions, and action plans. It promotes effective intragroup communication through several features:

•Everyone’s ideas are included.

•Linkages with other ideas are made visible.

•Consequences of pursuing the ideas are identified.

•Requirements for implementing the ideas are identified.

With the help of an able facilitator, the process allows a group to separate ideas from individuals and discuss them as part of a system of options, issues, and goals.

The methods we have introduced, when practiced with patience and honest engagement, promote equality and connection; honor thoughts, opinions, and feelings; foster mindfulness of one’s own mental processes and group dynamics; and increase group creativity and learning. They are part and parcel of the empowerment work described later in this chapter. The increasingly prevalent virtual teams—that is, groups mostly linked together by electronic communication—are likely to require even more attention to communication (Antonakis and Atwater, 2002). Wherever possible, at least some face-to-face interaction should supplement electronic forms (see Kostner, 1994).

Some team members—especially those from an individualistic culture that prizes quick action—may object to the patience and time required for these methods. They may have to be reassured that efforts to garner diverse ideas and align team members around a shared purpose will pay off with higher-quality group decisions and products (see Wheelan, 1999).

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Matching Communication Style

and Content to Group Type and Needs

Team leaders need to remember that every group is unique and full of unpredictable behavior. At the same time, leaders should be sensitive to common stages of group development.

As Susan Wheelan points out, fledgling teams with a designated leader are likely to respond best if the leader uses a somewhat directive communication style; as the team moves toward greater cohesion and shared leadership, the style should become far more participative (Wheelan, 1999). The leader also should provide basic understanding of group process and development—for example, by noting that the group should expect conflict and that conflict handled constructively helps the group become more cohesive. Some teams, however, do not have a designated leader and may choose to share leadership roles from the outset. Some groups also come together with a relatively high level of trust (on the basis of prior relationships, reputation, or long experience with teamwork). These groups may resist directive communication and explanations about group process; the challenge with these groups is to try new working habits or to welcome and educate newcomers.

Team leaders are also often responsible for communicating with groups outside the team. They may need to report to someone or a group that authorized the team in the first place. They may need to promote the group or highlight its progress to several external audiences in order to garner support and resources for the team.

Empowerment

We define empowerment as helping each group member claim and develop his or her power in service of the group’s mission and promoting a sense of shared leadership in the group. To do so, team members need a shared understanding of the team’s mission, goals, decision-making procedures, rules, norms, work plan, and evaluation methods. They also need to know which roles and responsibilities they are expected to carry out. They need to see leaders and followers as mutually empowering.

A team may have an assigned mission; even some goals, roles, and norms may be specified in advance. The team, however, should

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decide for itself how to modify, supplement, or supplant its assignments. In the case of a team established by some outside authority, a key early task of a designated team leader is to ensure that the team has enough authority to carry out its work (see Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003). An important leadership task is ensuring that the group begins with at least a general sense of what its mission is. Full-fledged goal setting and role clarification may be postponed until group members have worked together awhile, but “group norming” should happen early. The “snowcard” technique for establishing or revisiting group norms is offered in Exercise 3.1. In preparation for doing the exercise, a team leader may want to mention that productive work groups establish norms related to innovation, task achievement, and mutual support (Wheelan, 1999). Examples of norms related to innovation include “open to quirky ideas,” “OK to fail,” “learn from failures,” “open to different practices,” “laughter and fun encouraged.” As with methods described in the previous section, snowcards allow everyone’s ideas to be considered; they give a picture of which ideas are most supported by the group. Snowcards are a quick method too for gathering and organizing team members’ proposals for mission, goals, and subtasks.

When a group initially comes together, the norms are more aspirations than genuinely accepted unwritten rules. What is helpful about explicitly identifying desired norms early on is that they are likely to be constructive; almost all the groups we have facilitated, for example, identify norms related to openness, sharing of information, mutual respect, safety for risk taking and disagreement, and cooperation. Those constructive norms are a touchstone that a leader can emphasize as the group continues; importantly, they are a means whereby a leader can activate team members’ selfconcepts tied to openness and self-transcendence (see Lord and Brown, 2001). One of the most important leadership tasks is to consistently model the norms the group has adopted.

Team leaders should also encourage group members to agree on basic decision-making procedures. Considerable evidence supports the value of consensus as a method of ensuring that group support for a decision is high (L. Thompson, 2001; Johnson and Johnson, 2003). Since achieving full-blown consensus can be extremely time consuming, the wisest route may be reserving consensus for decisions about mission and overarching goals and

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Exercise 3.1. Using “Snowcards” to

Identify and Agree on Norms.

1.Ask the group the question, What norms or standards would be good for us to establish to help us accomplish our work together? Think of the “unwritten rules” that might improve performance, inspire commitment, or enhance satisfaction.

2.Have individuals in the group brainstorm as many ideas as possible and record each idea on a separate “snowcard,” such as a Post-it note, 5'' × 7'' card, or oval or square of paper.

3.Have individuals share their ideas in round-robin fashion.

4.Tape the ideas to the wall. As a group, remove duplication and cluster similar ideas in categories. Establish subcategories as needed. The resulting clusters of cards may resemble a “blizzard” of ideas—hence the term snowcards.

5.Clarify ideas.

6.Once all the ideas are on the wall and included in categories, rearrange and tinker with the categories until they make the most sense. Place a card giving the category name above each cluster.

7.If needed, help the group decide which clusters or individual norms have strong group support (for example, by giving each person a certain number of sticky dots to apply to the norms he or she deems most important).

8.As a group, decide how to monitor and reinforce the norms.

9.After the exercise, distribute a copy of the norms listed by categories to all members of the group.

strategies, and even then using methods that define consensus as the wholehearted support of the many and acquiescence of a few. For decisions that are not subject to consensus, executive decision making by one person or a small group with consultation is usually best ( Johnson and Johnson, 2003).

Although it’s certainly logical that groups would clarify their mission and set achievable goals before they agree on strategies, they may actually be able to agree more easily on strategies and action plans. Often people do not fully know what their mission and goals ought to be until they create viable strategies and actions (Eden and Ackermann, 1998; Huxham, 2003). Regardless of the

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sequencing of these decisions, an action plan is needed. An action plan should include attention to stakeholders, the means of acquiring needed resources, assignment of team member roles and responsibilities, a timeline for task completion, and evaluation methods. Assigned roles and responsibilities should relate to individual team members’ skills and other resources; they should be challenging, but not so challenging that team members feel overwhelmed. Cooperative work (by the entire team or subgroup) should be built into the plan to foster creativity, synergy, and mutual support. If team members are representing stakeholder groups, the timelines should include time for consulting stakeholders and apprising the team of stakeholder feedback. In many cases, the team needs a strategy for relating to other teams and to a larger organization of which it is a part (Zaccaro, Rittman, and Marks, 2001).

Often a team realizes that members need to upgrade their skills or develop new ones. The action plan then should include opportunities for training, including training in group process skills. Evaluation of the team’s work should be ongoing through built-in opportunities for constructive feedback on individual and group performance. Many experts on group dynamics recommend taking time at the end of every group meeting to review how well the group observed its own norms and offer ideas for improvement (Wheelan, 1999). It may be helpful to appoint at least one team member to monitor the group’s communication patterns to report on how closely the team approaches optimal interaction, in which about two-thirds of verbal comments focus on task achievement and most of the remaining third on support of group members (see Wheelan, 1999). To be constructive, both individual and group feedback should focus on specific behavior, highlight accomplishment as well as failure, avoid blaming and personal attacks, be tied to group tasks, and emphasize specific remedies for problems.

Groups undertaking complex, long-term projects are likely to benefit from one or more retreats to help focus on their mission, vision of success, and action plan (see, for example, Weisman, 2003). These groups should also schedule celebrations to mark attainment of milestones.

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Leadership Development

To maximize the contributions of team members, the team leader(s) should seek to develop leadership capacity in everyone, so that leadership tasks such as recruiting new team members, modeling active listening, and reinforcing norms of openness and selftranscendence can be taken on by many if not all group members. Tasks such as planning and conducting meetings or coordinating specific projects can be rotated among group members. Task sharing fosters a more egalitarian atmosphere, allows people to contribute particular expertise, and enables everyone to be in a supportive follower role at least part of the time. Sharing leadership tasks may also help a diverse group become more cohesive, since members from differing cultures have a chance for prominence (Chen and Van Velsor, 1996). Building leadership capacity among team members is also a means of grooming successors for the time when those who have had prominent leadership roles in the team move on to other responsibilities. A team that is expected to last for some time may benefit from crafting a leadership development plan for itself.

To foster shared leadership, Fletcher and Kaüfer emphasize the importance of developing relational skills. They suggest building on the skills team members have learned through family or community involvement, examples being “a welcoming stance toward change; an ability to focus long-term versus short-term goals; and an ability to integrate thinking, feeling, and acting into practice” (Fletcher and Kaüfer, 2003, p. 33). Charles Manz and his colleagues offer techniques of self-leadership that foster shared leadership (Manz and Sims, 2001; Houghton, Neck, and Manz, 2003). Of course, it is also important to remember that more egalitarian societal cultures are more supportive of shared leadership than other cultures.

Trust and Spirit

The recruitment, communication, empowerment, and leadership development methods discussed so far all contribute to the trust building that so many team leadership analysts identify as one of the most important ingredients of a productive team (Useem,

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1998; Kouzes and Posner, 2002). When a group first comes together, trust may hardly exist among the group members unless they have previous connections. (In some cases, of course, previous connections might actually undermine trust!) Team leaders should constantly assess the level of trust in a group and tailor communication and other activities accordingly. James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest a number of ways in which leaders build trust:

•Making their values, ethics, and standards clear, and then living by them

•Keeping their commitments and promises

•Trusting those from whom they seek trust

•Going first

•Being open and sensitive to the needs of others

•Demonstrating competence

Team spirit grows in the medium of trust, but it also refers to a shared enthusiasm for the group’s mission and a belief that the team can accomplish great things together. Leaders foster team spirit by ensuring that the team has challenging tasks that can be competently performed (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). They also let every individual shine as well as celebrate the team, blend challenge and support, help team members learn from defeat and difficulty, remind everyone of why the team’s work is important, and help the group laugh at itself.

In a team with a high level of trust and spirit, each member knows he or she can rely on the others to fulfill their roles competently and reliably, verbal and nonverbal cues are easily deciphered, and productivity amazes observers and even the members. These teams achieve what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a state of flow (1990).

The importance of trust and spirit was evident in two teams connected to the African American Men Project and the Vital Aging Initiative. Gary Cunningham asked one of us ( John) to use various stakeholder analyses to help devise a viable political strategy for the African American Men Project. John and Gary had worked together before at the University of Minnesota and remained friends, supporters, and admirers after Gary left to become head of planning for Hennepin County. Neither Gary nor John

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knew exactly how to use stakeholder analyses for the purpose at hand (several new techniques actually had to be invented to help with the effort), but Gary had faith in John’s ability to come up with something useful, and John had faith in Gary’s ability to manage key stakeholder input, expectations, and commitments. John then recruited Karen Lokkesmoe, a doctoral student at the university, to help, and Gary created a team with whom John and Karen could work. The team consisted of Hennepin County staff members (one was also a former student of John’s) and community activists. The team of Euro-Americans and African Americans became a high-performing team, in part by directly confronting racial tensions in the group; it did create a political strategy that won the day with the steering group and the county commissioners. The group was justifiably proud of its accomplishments.

In the Vital Aging case, one of us (Barbara) agreed to work with Jan Hively and two other women to explore how the Humphrey Institute of Public affairs might contribute to the Vital Aging Initiative. The other two women were Sharon Anderson, the institute’s director of professional development, and Shelby Andress, an alumnus of a Humphrey Institute seminar and a retired senior member of a Minneapolis research organization. Barbara and Sharon had teamed up many times over the preceding twenty years, and all four women knew each other well and had great respect for each other’s skills. In an initial meeting, the women engaged in free-flowing information exchange about the initiative, possible connections with Humphrey programs, and personal perceptions of vital aging. In subsequent meetings, we agreed to take on a specific project: organizing focus groups in preparation for the Vital Aging Summit. We parceled out roles and responsibilities and agreed on timelines. We stayed in touch between meetings via e-mail, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations. The focus groups were completed, and results were compiled and submitted to the summit organizers.

Team meetings were not perfect by group process standards; not everyone was able to be on time, and we seldom reviewed the quality of each meeting. The group did, however, coalesce around a task, laid groundwork for future work together on the challenging Vital Aging project, and supported each other in actually carrying out the task. We checked periodically on how satisfied each person was with the group’s progress. We laughed a lot, sympa-

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Exercise 3.2. Assessing Your Team.

Rate your team.

Good Average Poor

Membership

1.Team members have shared purpose.

2.Team members contribute needed knowledge, contacts, and skills.

3.Team members represent needed diversity of views and backgrounds.

4.Team size is appropriate.

Effective Communication

1.Team members listen to each other’s views.

2.Important messages are expressed clearly.

3.Conflict is managed constructively.

4.Team members laugh together.

5.The setting for a team meeting contributes to the team’s effectiveness.

6.Team members are sensitive to their cultural differences.

Empowerment

1.The team has a clear mission and goals.

2.The team has effective strategies for obtaining needed resources.

3.Decision-making rules are clear.

4.Major responsibilities, timelines, and evaluation methods are spelled out in action plans.

5.Team norms support openness, sharing, mutual support, and cooperation.

6.Challenge and support are tailored to members’ needs and abilities.

Leadership Development

1.Team leaders groom successors.

2.Leadership responsibilities are shared.

3.Team members organize team training sessions.

4.The team has a comprehensive leadership development program.