The Hedgehog Effect

The Secrets of Building High Performance Teams

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781119973362
• eBook ISBN: 9781119962274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

In The Hedgehog Effect, Manfred Kets de Vries presents the case for leadership group coaching as an experiential training ground for learning to function as a high performance team. His group coaching model, incorporating living case studies, has been developed over more than 20 years of delivering programs to top-level executives and sets the standard in the field of leadership group coaching.

Written for coaches, consultants, leadership development directors, and anyone working in or with teams, The Hedgehog Effect begins with an in-depth analysis of what teams and groups are all about. The intricacies of leadership coaching are illustrated with an elaborate example of a team coaching intervention. In Part Two, the author applies a psychodynamic lens to the dynamics of teams and groups, taking a close look at relationship patterns, how groups evolve, and the phenomenon of the group-as-a-whole. Part Three takes a more systemic perspective, addressing the challenges that change processes pose for people in organizations, and how to create best places to work. Kets de Vries supports the whole with the story of an organizational change initiative accomplished through group coaching.

PART ONE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE OF GROUPS AND TEAMS

CHAPTER 1

HOW A GROUP BECOMES A TEAM

Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.

—Ryunosuke Satoro

Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.

—Kenyan Proverb

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

“One for all, and all for one”—the famous oath from Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers—symbolizes the quintessence of teamwork. It is through cooperation, rather than conflict, that we attain our greatest successes. If we are prepared to support each other, the greater part of our problems will already be solved. As d’Artagnan and the three musketeers understood, their fate as individuals was tied to their fate as a group.

As novels on camaraderie go, it would be hard to find one as famous, or that has so completely captured the popular imagination, as The Three Musketeers. It is a confounding narrative: joyful, maddening, eccentric, full of convoluted twists and turns. It dramatizes significant events in the history of France—the action begins in 1625 and ends three years later—and entertains the reader with spectacular displays of bravery, loyalty, and wit on the part of the three musketeers and their young comrade-in-arms, d’Artagnan. The four heroes of the tale are involved in labyrinthine intrigues concerning the weak King Louis XIII of France, his powerful and cunning advisor Cardinal Richelieu, the beautiful Queen Anne of Austria, her English lover, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and the siege of the rebellious Huguenot city of La Rochelle.

With great ambitions, d’Artagnan, the main protagonist of the story, sets out for Paris with three gifts from his father: the modest sum of 15 crowns, a horse, and a letter of introduction to the captain of the King’s Musketeers, a military unit serving as the protectors of the Royal Household. D’Artagnan wants to become a musketeer himself, and must prove himself worthy of such a position; however, he doesn’t have much going for him except his wits and his skill as a swordsman. But with the help of his fellow musketeers—the legendary and noble Athos, the devoted Porthos, and the cunning Aramis—d’Artagnan succeeds in gaining glory, and fulfills his destiny.

Teamwork saves the day in The Three Musketeers. Loyal to each other to the death, the musketeers have no compunction at pulling a fast one on their enemies. The strength they have in working as a team, their devotion to excellence, their willingness to sacrifice, their great trust in each other, their generosity of heart and spirit, and—the most powerful virtue of all—their unshakable dedication to a cause greater than themselves, inspire the reader’s imagination. It is a tale that can be viewed as a moral lesson, highlighting the importance of cooperation, unity, and perseverance.

A team like the three (or, even better, four) musketeers is timeless. The characters in this book are so life-like and the dialogues so real that we can easily transplant this 19th-century novel about 17th-century events to our day and age, laugh at the comedic elements in the tale, and cry at the tragic ones. In many ways, the adventures of d’Artagnan and the three musketeers are universal—teams are an inspiring feature of human life. To quote a Japanese proverb, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

This story touches on many of the themes we will explore in the various chapters of this book. The best team is one where members are ready to take personal risks, prepared to tackle conflict, and willing to have courageous conversations. These developments, however, are contingent upon an underlying team culture of trust, reciprocity in self-disclosure to improve interpersonal dialogue, and constructive conflict resolution.

The story of Dumas’s heroes also helps to make a connection from the wide-ranging exploration of the group-as-a-whole, to a more specific description of well-functioning teams. Just as individuals have moods, emotions and other peculiarities, groups (or teams) have similar characteristics, which influence aspects such as cohesiveness, performance and the emotional state of other group members.

The musketeers’ battle cry—“All for one, and one for all”—reveals some of the signifiers that make teams work. The musketeers believed that when one of them was in trouble, they were all in trouble. If one of them needed help, they all provided it. If one succeeded, they all succeeded. For them, reciprocity and interpersonal trust were indisputable. At both a conscious and at an unconscious level, their behavior was in sync. Due to their team spirit and friendship, the musketeers discovered they could accomplish anything as a team, if they just put their mind to it.

Alexandre Dumas’s fictional 17th-century adventure remains an effective prescription for our third millennium workplace; the underlying, out-of-awareness psychodynamic individual and team processes of his musketeers were aligned with the task at hand. Helping to create this kind of team is one of the over-arching objectives of executive and leadership group coaching.

TEAMS: WHAT, WHY, AND HOW

Before discussing teams, let’s first specify the difference between a group and a team. A group is any number of individuals who form a recognizable unit, cluster, or aggregation.

Teams are specific groups of people with (it is hoped) complementary skills and abilities who join together to collaborate. People in a team possess a high degree of interdependence geared toward the achievement of a common goal or completion of a task for which they hold one another mutually accountable. In contrast to most groups, teams often identify and reach an agreement on their common goals and approaches, rather than looking to a leader to define them. What’s more, the outcome of a team’s activities will affect team members as a whole, not just each member individually. In the organizational context, team members are empowered to share responsibility for specific performance outcomes, and work together for a limited period of time. The most effective size for teams is between five and 12 people. Larger teams require more structure and support, while smaller teams often have difficulty engaging in robust discussions when members are absent [1–7]. (As groups and teams essentially differ depending on the degree and intensity of interdependence, throughout this book these two terms will be used interchangeably).

Are you a part of a team or do you merely belong to a group of people?

Study the following questions and answer them either YES or NO

	YES	NO
1. Do the people you work with have a high degree of interdependence, geared toward the achievement of a common goal or completion of a task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable?
2. Do you belong to a group of people with complementary skills and abilities who come together to collaborate?
3. Does the outcome of your activities affect not merely you, but all the other people you work with?

If you answered YES to all these questions, you are most likely part of a team.

As a caveat here, I should point out that although well-functioning teams are essential to the world of work, there are occasions when putting together a team to get a project off the ground may not really be the best option. Some jobs or projects can be completed much more effectively if assigned to one person. But when jobs are very interdependent and the task is highly complex, teams can replace individual executives to carry out what used to be traditional, single-executive functions.

Having asserted how important well-functioning teams will be in this new world of work, we need to ask ourselves how truly effective most teams really are. We know (frequently from personal experience) that many teams do not live up to their billing. A substantial body of research shows that many claims about the benefits of teamwork appear to be more fantasy than reality [8, 9]. There are numerous damning signifiers of people’s negative experiences of teamwork, for example: “A committee is a group of people who can do nothing individually but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done”; “A team is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary”; “A team is an animal with four back legs.” Far too often, teams soak up too much time and too many resources, flounder, and become quicksands of tension and antagonism.

Creating a winning team implies taking a collection of individuals with different personalities (perceptions, needs, attitudes, motivations, backgrounds, expertise, and expectations), and transforming them into an integrated, effective, holistic work unit. This can be quite a challenge. Some personality types just do not click. For many different reasons, some people’s character and behavior are like the proverbial red rag to a bull [10].

Teams and Need Systems

One way to approach the challenge of creating well-functioning teams is to focus not on what makes people different, but on what they have in common. For example, teams can satisfy our sense of belonging. In other words, while teams may initially be formed to fulfill a task, they may also meet other needs at an individual level. Many people like working in teams because they desire a sense of social interaction, affiliation with a community, and pride of accomplishment or greater purpose. In fact these intrinsic rewards may be even more important to individual members than financial or other tangible means of compensation. Therefore, addressing individual needs may well contribute to motivating team membership and performance.

“Most people have a powerful desire to be part of a group in which they feel recognized and understood.”

Most people have a powerful desire to be part of a group in which they feel recognized and understood. Belonging—being part of a social context—is essential for the development of self-esteem and self-confidence. Social outcasts may end up feeling empty and depressed. Social connection (and fear of losing it) is crucial to the quality (in some cases, even the duration) of our lives. Applying this lens to teams, it is clear that individuals in teams are less anxious about the work they need to accomplish when they are part of a team that takes the time to build a sense of community and belonging for all members. Altruism—the desire to make a difference—also draws people to work in team...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• DEDICATION
• PREFACE
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PART ONE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE OF GROUPS AND TEAMS
• PART TWO: A PSYCHODYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE ON INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS
• PART THREE: CREATING AUTHENTIZOTIC ORGANIZATIONS
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX: INSTRUMENTS
• Index