Teamership: Emerging Best Practice Leadership

We need leaders who are able to support performance in a team-based network. Photo by Marcus Reubenstein on Unsplash

There is no singular “one best practice” for anything as complex as leadership and leadership development. If anyone tells you that there is, please proceed with caution.

There are some principles that position leaders to be more effective in our organisations.

Here is one of those principles. It is emerging as central to best practice in leadership:

Organisations need to make the switch from functional hierarchy to team-based and network organisation models.

This is not new.

We have seen this model in organisations and sectors as diverse as healthcare (Buurtzorg in the Netherlands), home appliances and technology (Haier in China) and military (U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – documented in Team of Teams).

These examples are shifting from being edge cases to a competitive advantage. Soon they will be mainstream.

There is a recognition and desire to operate as a team-based network. 

The language of “functional hierarchy to team-based and network” comes from work by Deloitte in 2019. At that point, 65% of survey respondents viewed the shift as important or very important.

Shifting toward a team-based organisational model improves performance, often significantly.

 The overwhelming majority (74%) of organisations that areat least partially operating as a team-based network are seeing improvements in performance.

A total of 53% of respondents reported that operating as a team-based network had led to a significant improvement in performance.

Team-based organisations are still the exception, not the norm.

Organisations want to function as networks because it improves performance.

You would imagine that would mean that a big chunk of organisations were adopting this approach.

Turns out that’s not the case. Only 7 percent of respondents felt very ready to execute this shift, and only 6 percent rated themselves very effective at managing cross-functional teams.

Let’s generously assume that the rate has doubled and there is now 15% of organisations who are very ready for this and 12% very effective at managing cross-functional teams. It leaves 85%+ of our organisations who aren’t ready.

The Emerging Best Practice for leadership is this:

We need leaders who are able to support performance in a team-based network.

Here is what that means.

75% of teams don’t exist on the org chart.

Teams can include employees, contractors, vendors and be co-located, hybrid or fully remote.

Leadership cannot rely on positional authority, hierarchy or many traditional levers like performance reviews, threats of a restructure or promises of promotion.

It requires us to redefine leadership and redesign leadership development. More on those in the next few weeks.

For now, I just want to point out that this is the time to get on board.

Not at the bleeding edge and before the late majority have made this way of working stick.

It is still early enough to get a competitive advantage that helps drive performance, strengthen culture and attract talent before it becomes cost of entry.

Here are a few things to consider this week:

1. How has the role of leadership changed in the past 1, 5, 10 or 20 years?

2. What is required of current leaders that was not required of leaders in the past?

3. What was required of leaders in the past, but no longer required of current leaders?