Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams

How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results

Roger M. Schwarz

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780787988739
• eBook ISBN: 9781118235423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A proven approach for helping leaders and teams work together to achieve better decisions, greater commitment, and stronger results

More than ever, effective leadership requires us to work as a team, but many leaders struggle to get the results they need. When stakes are high, you can't get great results by just changing what you do. You also need to change how you think. Organizational psychologist and leadership consultant Roger Schwarz applies his 30+ years of experience working with leadership teams to reveal how leaders can drastically improve results by changing their individual and team mindset.

• Provides practical guidance to help teams increase decision quality, decrease implementation time, foster innovation, get commitment, reduce costs and increase trust
• Outlines 5 core values leadership teams can adopt to exponentially improve results
• Author of The Skilled Facilitator and The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook

Get the results you and your team need. Start by applying the practical wisdom of Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams.

CHAPTER 1

How Well Does Your Team Really Work?

Why is it that when smart leaders gather to function as a leadership team, so often the team gets stuck? Why is it that the team as a whole seems less smart than its individual members? Why can’t the team generate strong results? Why doesn’t its supposed teamwork pay off?

Does the paradox and frustration of smart leaders working as a less-smart team describe your own situation? Consider these questions:

• Do you doubt your team really pulls its collective weight?
• During your team meetings, do you ever wish you could be elsewhere, or that the faces at the table could be different?
• When your boss—an executive or your board—asks you what your team is accomplishing toward a strategic goal, do you sometimes think, “What can I say that’s both true and upbeat?”
• Do you suspect some of your team members resent how much time they spend in your meetings? Do you feel like much of your team meeting time is wasted time?

If you’ve been speed-reading up to now, slow down for a minute to really think about these questions: How effective is the team you lead at reaching its most important objectives? How agile is your team at recognizing major challenges and deciding what to do about them? What results does your team achieve by working together that its members couldn’t gain by working independently? How much does the team contribute to your own ability to make the best decisions possible? How accountable do other members of the team really feel to each other for what the team must accomplish? How much do team members enhance one another’s work outside the team?

You and your team you may be getting along with business and each other, but I can all but guarantee you that you are all working from a premise that hugely limits your team’s potential. You didn’t create this problem, but it’s holding all of you back. The cause? The idea, widely held almost as an article of faith, that there is one leader in the room.

“One Leader in the Room”?

What makes me so sure the team you lead falls short of its potential? The answer has to do with mindset: the set of core values and assumptions from which individuals and groups operate. It is the way of seeing that shapes every thought, feeling, and behavior. In even moderately challenging situations, virtually all leaders tend to use what I call a unilateral control mindset, despite the negative results it generates. Research conducted by Chris Argyris and Don Schön in the 1970s found that under pressure, 98 percent of profes­sionals used this approach.¹ Their study covered six thousand individuals, and over the decades since then, my colleagues and I have analyzed thousands more cases in which our clients have faced challenging situations where they were not as effective as they wanted to be. The clients include professional men and women ranging from CEOs to first-level supervisors, including engineers, physicians, sales and marketing experts, scientists, HR and OD consultants, finance experts, and educators in corporate, governmental, and nonprofit organizations from more than twelve countries. Among all those thousands, we have identified fewer than ten leaders who did not use the unilateral control approach when a serious challenge reduced their effectiveness. Despite all the developments in leadership over the last forty years, when it comes to challenging situations almost all leaders slip into the same mindset. They have reasons for doing so, but there are also good reasons (and ways) to change it.

Traditionally, when people think of the leader of an organization, division, or team, they think of the person who has the greatest authority, such as the CEO, president of the division, or team leader. And almost always, they think of that person as the sole leader of that unit. They assign many leadership responsibilities to that leader, the most obvious being that the leader has the right and corresponding duty to make the decisions for the team. This perception of a leader as the one leader in the room translates into considering that leader solely responsible for all the leadership of the team: guiding the direction of the meeting, challenging the entire group’s thinking, and raising concerns about team members’ performance. This one-leader-in-the-room approach requires the one in the hot seat to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-doing, and to guide the whole content and process of the meeting. It’s as if the team is a boat with one person serving as designer, captain, navigator, and engineer at the same time, and the rest of the crew merely show up and row.

Does any of that resonate with you right now? If so, it’s no surprise. All leaders have run up against the untenable expectations and responsibilities of this traditional notion of what a leader does.

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Take the Short Survey

This book can help you with real problems you’re experiencing as a leader on the job and in the other organizations that make up your life. To help you identify what’s at the heart of the problem, go to www.schwarzassociates.com/resources/survey/. Complete the survey—a three- to five-minute investment—and consider the analysis you see based on your answers. Each item gets at some aspect of how the unilateral control approach or mindset undercuts the actual effectiveness of a team. (The analysis is framed in terms of the core values of an alternative mindset called mutual learning that I introduce later in this chapter.)

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Stuck in Unilateral Control: An Example

John Haley had recently been promoted to group president of a global design and manufacturing company. But John and his leadership team were stuck.

The business was underperforming financially, and they needed to turn it around. They were developing a new strategy but having trouble finalizing it and moving into action. In meetings, leadership team members would routinely agree to an element of the new strategy (or be silent) and then come to John individually after the meeting to tell him why he shouldn’t follow through on what the team had apparently decided. Every time John held another team meeting to address the issue, people kept coming to him afterward with the same sort of advice. People weren’t saying in the team what they were really thinking. Instead they were only speaking to John in private. This pattern made it impossible to get a real strategy in place to generate the numbers they needed.

Why were team members reluctant to discuss the issues in the full group? All the team members acted as though they were necessarily right and a win-lose atmosphere pervaded the room. If one member brought up an idea, others who disagreed would quickly shoot it down or dismiss it. People asked few questions of each other—and when they did, it was mostly to make a point, rather than to understand another member’s view.

John needed his leaders to be more accountable to each other and to the business as a whole. Each of the team members led either a business unit or a staff function that supported all the business units. In John’s mind, the team members were interdependent and needed to work closely together to identify and take advantage of potential synergies among the business units, but they weren’t acting that way. To John, this meant that members needed to be asking each other about their businesses and challenging each other. But as John explained, “No one questioned the other leaders’ business unit performance even though there was variability. No one said: ‘Hey Joe, why are your expenses so high?’ My fear was that they were doing it in their heads but not articulating their concerns.”

Team members were reluctant to hold their peers accountable, partly because they were concerned about putting others on the spot and, in turn, being challenged by others. By going to John after the meetings, they thought they were being compassionate; they could raise their concerns with John privately and get them addressed indirectly, rather than having to air differences of opinion openly in the full group.

John wasn’t aware that his own operating system—his mindset—was contributing to the problem he was complaining about. His unilateral control model of leadership led him to see it as solely his job to hold individual team members accountable, rather than placing a burden on them to hold each other accountable. This reinforced the team members’ mindset that they didn’t need to hold each other accountable. John and his leadership team were stuck; until they got unstuck, they weren’t going to make any progress in turning the business around. John and his team needed a new operating system to learn how to get unstuck and to turn the business around. With time and work to change their mindset, they did just that. In a few months, they were able to craft a strategy that had the full support of the entire team and that they began to implement. The new strategy and the way the team worked together paid off. Over the next few years, the operating group increased their revenue by more than 400 percent.

Why Leaders Stay Stuck

I’m not the first to point out that leaders who use a unilateral control approach undermine the power of teams. Others have noted the inherent tension between acting from a mindset of unilateral control and simultaneously expecting that your direct reports share accountability for results.² So, given that the problem is widely recognized, why don’t leaders choose another way? Why don’t leaders simply get unstuck?

One reason is that, like John and his team, people aren’t fully aware of the mindset they are actually in. In your own organization, I’m guessing you hear other leaders (perhaps your boss?) use language that espouses openness, cooperation, and the sharing of accountability between peer members of a team, but when you listen to or watch the same leaders in challenging situations, they seem to be guided by an opposite mindset, unilateral control, without recognizing the discrepancy.

This isn’t simply a matter of saying one thing and doing another. If it were, it would be easy to change. The problem is that in challenging situations, the mindset leaders use is rarely the one they think they are using.³

For example, imagine that I gave you a situation with your team and asked you what principles you would use to guide your behavior—what I call your “espoused mindset.”⁴ Let’s say you’re working with your team to develop a strategy and you and the team members are at odds. In this situation, you might tell me that you believe it’s important to get everyone aligned, important that all of them share their own thinking, important that others should try to understand different perspectives, for people to be curious, and so on. You might continue by saying that your role would be to create the kind of environment in which this discus­sion could occur. However, if I could video record the meeting and then dub in another face and voice in place of yours, you might well note that the leader’s behavior doesn’t seem to match the espoused mindset you shared with me. Instead of asking people what the group might be missing, the leader simply figures out what it’s missing and tells others about it. Instead of trying to understand everyone’s perspective, the leader tries to convince others why their view is wrong. It’s not simply a matter of saying one thing but doing another. It’s that the mindset that really guides the behavior is not the mindset you think you have. That sort of gap is easy to see in someone else, but human nature usually blinds people to it in themselves.

People tend to be unaware of using a unilateral control mind­set. They use it automatically, without thinking about it. And that unawareness serves a purpose. It simplifies the problem and avoids an awkward realization of personal priorities: What I really need to do in this meeting is make sure that no matter what happens, my solution prevails.

When people are consciously aware of using a unilateral control mindset, they believe that what they’re doing makes sense and that the behavior is for the good of the team and organization. From their own perspective, they are acting in a way that will get the best results, regardless of what others might think. Unfortunately, it won’t.

A second reason leaders stay stuck, clinging to a unilateral con­trol, one-leader-in-the-room approach, is the difficulty of imagining a workable alternative. Everyone knows that opening up decision making to the team can get the group stuck because people have conflicting ideas and conflict is inevitable, uncomfortable, and painful to deal with.

Team members don’t want painful conflict either, so they help the leader stay stuck. They depend on the formal leader’s use of control, reinforcing it even as they complain about it. They see it as the formal leader’s role to raise and resolve difficult issues that are hindering the team’s performance, even as they privately express frustration that the leader either doesn’t see the issues or doesn’t address them properly. They see it as the formal leader’s role to give feedback to problematic peers even as they complain to others about not seeing changes in peers’ behavior. They believe the leader ought to have personal insight into the leader’s own contributions to team problems—while they withhold the information that would make the leader’s understanding possible.

Leaders and members all think, “That’s the formal leader’s job. That is what leaders get paid for.” Members expect the boss to make things happen without realizing that they themselves have a lock on the information on which action could be taken and need to be accountable for sharing that information, speaking up, and expressing their needs. As a result, all participants continue to act in ways that reinforce the roles and results they’re dissatisfied with.

These aren’t problems of being poor bosses or poor direct reports. These are problems with how people think of the relationship between a formal leader and team members. But when they do seek some other means of team success, they try sundry tools or programs that don’t actually address or fundamentally challenge how they view the relationship between a formal leader and team members. They try “the participative leader,” leader-generated “cultures of commitment,” and the “empowerin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• CHAPTER 1: How Well Does Your Team Really Work?
• CHAPTER 2: How You and Your Team Get Stuck: The Unilateral Control Approach
• CHAPTER 3: Getting Unstuck to Get Results: The Mutual Learning Approach
• CHAPTER 4: Getting the Puzzle Pieces on the Table: Mutual Learning Behaviors 1–4
• CHAPTER 5: Putting the Puzzle Together: Mutual Learning Behaviors 5–8
• CHAPTER 6: Designing for Mutual Learning
• CHAPTER 7: Dealing With Common Team Challenges
• CHAPTER 8: Becoming a Smarter Leader
• CHAPTER 9: Becoming a Smarter Team
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• About Roger Schwarz & Associates
• End User License Agreement