leadership

One point that group development theory (discussed in stages of the group) largely ignores is the possibility of dispensing with a leader or, at least, dispensing with a permanent leader. In the Red Stripe team, as in many others, it would have been possible to rotate the position of team leader weekly or monthly, either randomly or by election. The team could also have elected its leader (perhaps after the first month when things had settled down a bit and people had got a good sense of each other’s strengths and skills and personalities). I think this would have required Mike not to stand for election, otherwise he would almost inevitably have been confirmed in his role, both because of his senior status in the Economist Group and because it would be a perceived slap in the face to vote for someone else.


When he talked to me about this point at the end of the six months, Mike observed that ‘there were more people that wanted to be led, rather than lead.’ But isn’t that normally the case? As Gerard Fairtlough might say, that’s what the ‘

hegemony of hierarchy’ does for you.

When I asked Javier, the team coach, about this team leader issue, he noted that the team inevitably brought with them the impression of The Economist Group’s organisational structure and their status within it. (I couldn’t help thinking of the expression: ‘bears the impression of the last arse that sat on it…). For the project founder and champion (and CIO) to have been anything other than the team leader would have been ‘cosmetic’ and the natural order would have reasserted itself when the team found itself under pressure, said Javier. And, as for having no leader, he felt that one was needed to move the team forwards in order to meet its deadlines.

I mention this issue because it’s now widely accepted that organisations should be flatter and less hierarchical, that power should be diffused and devolved and more networked, if they are to be able to respond fast enough to the pressure for continuous change and improvement. In all that has been written about the deficiencies of command-and-control driven organisational structures, there is a clear sense that self-organising teams or workgroups operate best when they use heterarchical or co-operative or 'female' modes of operation. These can include:

• Consensual decision-making rather than ‘orders’ imposed from above
• Job roles and tasks within the group being rotated or changed to meet current requirements
• Persuasion and engagement replacing the wielding of power and authority
• The selection of leader(s) by the team, rather than having them imposed.

Javier may be right that ‘the natural order’ would have reasserted itself under pressure. Arie de Geus says something similar when he talks about the reality of decentralisation and empowerment:

Few dare to risk the accompanying loss of control. Most of those who dare
will show their fears in a crisis. They will recentralise quickly, pulling power
back into the centre and into the top. After all, beneath the rhetoric about
empowerment, most managers trust themselves infinitely more than they trust
anybody else.

But Arie’s aspirational conclusion is rather different:

To behave with ecological concern often requires a leap of faith: you will
be better protected by harmony and flocking than by territoriality and force of
will.

Dilemmas

Electing and/or rotating the team leader is ‘fairer’, more democratic and likely to bring a wider range of different talents to the task. But it’s also likely to be inefficient at times and may be no more than window dressing.

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Credits:

Ducks: Pedro Simões
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innovation: the classic traps

Before starting, the team members were invited to read a number of books and articles:

In Innovation: The Classic Traps, Rosabeth Moss Kanter says that, after the dot-com crash, companies have focused on organic growth again. She concludes, however, that they shouldn’t listen to current customers because it can inhibit ‘breakthrough’ innovation. Her classic traps include:

Setting the hurdles too high or making the scope too narrow – not a problem for the Red Stripe team who had almost no constraints imposed on them.

Making controls too tight – requiring innovations to meet conventional, commercial criteria. You could argue this one either way with Red Stripe. In the end, they were challenged by the GMC and their expert advisers on commercial grounds. They needn’t have been if they had just ‘gone for it’, as they were allowed to do by their brief, but sooner or later they would have had to face the commercial music.

Leadership too weak and communication too poor – these are traps for the organisation as a whole as much as for the innovation team. But Kanter adds that ‘top managers frequently put the best technical people in charge, not the best leaders’. These people ‘emphasise tasks over relationships.’ I’ll discuss this in relation to Gerard Fairtlough’s assertion that leadership is a task. But managing relationships within the team is also a task. I talked to Joanna about this and she told me that she ‘would have been more involved in discussing interpersonal issues openly… would have felt better about it if obvious permission had been given’, even though she agreed that the team as a whole had given themselves permission to do that.

Closed environments – Kanter maintains that ‘by failing to tap others’ ideas, [teams produce] lackluster recommendations; and by failing to keep peers informed, they [miss] getting buy-in…’. Neither was a problem for Red Stripe. But, in accepting Mike’s conclusion that they perhaps went to the GMC too soon, and thus found themselves changing tack in response to the committee’s objections, it’s worth remembering Kanter’s opposite warning that teams which work in secret and then present their ideas fully formed at the end may ‘face unexpected objections that sometimes kill the project.’

Dilemmas:

Loosen controls… but not all of them and not too far.

Look outside for the best ideas and share them early to get buy-in and avoid last-minute resistance, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter. But for the Project Red Stripe team, who did both assiduously, one lesson was perhaps that they looked outside too long and shared too early.

lego®

A 2007 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review contained an article on Bridging Faultlines in Diverse Teams.

Lynda Gratton and her fellow authors studied 55 project teams (as opposed to the one that I observed) and were able to reach some 'important conclusions'. Amongst these were the observation that the first faultlines that occur in teams are superficial ones that reflect surface-level attributes like gender, nationality and functional background. Later on, deeper faultlines emerge, reflecting personal values, dispositions and attitudes.

The trick, the authors further conclude, is for the team leader first to assume a task orientation (getting the team to do things), switching later on to a relationship orientation, focusing on building trust and a common culture of shared values.

In the mucky real world, which I observed, Mike Seery did a bit of both and often at the same time. Inevitably, there was more 'team-building' at the outset, when the team didn't really have anything proper to do and more 'fire-fighting' at later stages when the team had too much to do and not enough time to stop and try and fix the culture.

The lego game

In the first week of the project, Mike got them to play the 'Lego game', where a Lego model was located in one room and the team had to replicate it with a supply of Lego bricks in another room. Team members were only allowed into the lavatory - where the master model resided - one at a time. They duly emerged, memorising some piece of the model, and tried to replicate it.

Though it started promisingly, problems soon emerged as team members began to move bricks that others had placed with certainty but, apparently, without precision. A strategy emerged as a result: each team member would be responsible for one area of the model, or for one colour of brick. This too dissolved in confusion. Eventually, Mike told them that there was a saboteur in the group, who 'might be hampering the others.'

Both Stewart and Joanna were quickly and separately suspected of being the culprit and Joanna didn't touch another block after Ludwig accused her of stealing the red bricks.

Groucho Marx-like, Stewart said that he didn't trust anyone who wanted to play the game - a tactic which could have led to a stand-off, but didn't because enough people still wanted to get a result. Techniques were discussed for identifying the saboteur once it was realised what was happening: one member of the team was changing the master model when they went to the lavatory. But none of these techniques was properly implemented.

It was perfectly clear to me that Ludwig was the culprit. Not only was he German, but he looked guilty, answered accusations made against him defensively and uncomfortably, and gave every impression of being unhappy with his role of disrupting the group. At the end, four of the five (Mike was running the exercise rather than participating) identified Ludwig as the saboteur. Only Ludwig rightly identified Steven as the saboteur.

At the end of the day Mike asked, 'What were our takeaways from the Lego game?'.

Joanna: 'I like to determine a process but everyone else seemed happy to just put their heads down and plough on. I just think the process is so critical.'

Tom: 'Don't trust a Chinese guy.'

Mike: 'No, it was don't rush in.'

So what was happening here? Well, for a start Mike was clearly putting himself outside the team by running the exercise rather than participating. Of course, he had to take that role if he was to introduce and run the game. The only alternative would have been to get an external facilitator to come in and run a game that Mike didn't know. (Mike later told me, 'I really did want to use someone else', and that cost was the principal reason for not using an external facilitator on occasions like this - a facilitator's daily rate would have quickly eaten into the project budget). In any case, the Lego exercise offered confirmation of how things were and would be. Mike was essentially running the show. This position had its pros and cons, which I talk about elsewhere, but the exercise could be seen in several ways:

It alerted the team to problems of planning and co-ordination on an unimportant exercise and before those issues arose in a more significant context.

It was potentially humiliating or embarrassing for the participants - and the embarrassment was observed, rather than shared, by the team leader.

Hierarchy

It confirmed that there was a clear hierarchy in operation. [And we've been doing hierarchy for so long that it's become the default mode for almost any social or micro-social structure.] Soon after the day of the Lego exercise, the team decided to try a different system: if one of them stood up, it was understood that they were acting as team leader until they sat down again. I never saw anyone do this but I took the idea back to my own office and agreed something similar with a colleague. In conversation, if one of us picked up a sheet of paper, we would be allowed by the other to carry on talking until we put the piece of paper down. Unsurprisingly, both experiments soon lapsed and the status quo reasserted itself - Mike led and my sentences remained unfinished. For me there was never a sense that anyone other than Mike could be the team leader; rather, from time to time, the others would challenge Mike's assumption of the role by becoming temporarily assertive or recalcitrant in their resistance to hierarchy.

Steven's conclusion in the public blog was as follows:

With or without a saboteur, we made a total mess of this exercise. We did not make a plan. We did not deal with adversity. We did not work as a team. We realised afterwards that one person could have recreated the model accurately within the time period given without any help from the others. Needless to say... we need to do better when we tackle the real model.

I have reservations about games and exercises like this. They can 'fix' our assumptions too early on. The Lego game certainly was referred to later and became a significant moment in the team's own history and in the stories that it told about itself. But I think it might be useful to give a team the chance to redeem itself after an episode like this, rather than risking that it define itself as 'crap at planning'.

And this habit that we have of defining and pigeon-holing ourselves, others and our relationships with them is nowhere more clearly seen than in a team like this. As I've said, later on in the project it felt like there was never time for exercises like this. But it might have been productive to run something like it later on to shake up the team's perceptions of each other, to loosen fixed ideas and to 'promote opportunities for change'.

Still, this is nit-picking. The team looked under some quite distasteful stones during the course of the exercise and carefully examined what they found.

Danish deviation

From an answer about Lego on answers.com I discover that the Danish language is a likely source for the following English words:

(It could be a Ted Hughes poem) ...and for the following scientific designations:

Jacobson's organ, Gram's stain and the Bohr effect.

Definitely my kind of language. In fact, would it be too long for the title of a darkly intense novel about guilt and homosexuality on a passenger ferry?

Dilemmas:

When you're forming a team, if you devise and run the team-building exercises yourself, you will tend to set yourself apart from the others in the group. But bringing in a facilitator or consultant to do it is expensive, time-consuming and likely to be less well focused on the particular needs of the team.

If you run team-building exercises that highlight communication or other issues, you get early warning of potential problems but may encourage the team to develop a fixed view of itself.

The moments in a team's trajectory when you most need to run exercises like this are, almost by definition, the moments when you haven't got time to run them.

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Credits:
Lego fish on a lego bicycle: Windell H. Oskay, http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
Wordle: www.wordle.net

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Preface - Sally Bibb

When Mike Seery told me about his idea to set up Project Red Stripe I thought what a wonderful opportunity it presented for The Economist Group. Not only did it open up the possibility of the development of an innovative idea for the web but it also presented a rare opportunity for organisational learning. Indeed it has been, and Andrew Carey has done an excellent job of uncovering and unpicking the process that the team went through, so that others will be able to learn about how to create innovative teams and cultures.

However, learning and knowing how to extract learning from any given situation is not always that easy. The world of work encourages doing not reflecting and learning. And when you only have 6 months to complete a project, with the eyes of the world as well as your own management on you, it undoubtedly feels pressurised at times.

I first got to know Mike Seery about 6 years before Red Stripe. He impressed me with an openness and ability to reflect and learn that I rarely see. He also has a collaborative style of leadership and he is a good listener. All qualities that made him the ideal person to take on this formidable task. Sitting in his office when he had just had the go-ahead for the project I was reminded that he was a person who was strong enough to provide the leadership and focus whilst being secure enough to allow the team freedom to create. I think it was Gerard Fairtlough who said that a leader's job was to provide 'true North' and then let the team get on with it. Of course Mike had the challenge of not knowing where true North was other than being a 'wow' web idea.

It was fortunate that Mike has the qualities I describe above as he was undoubtedly to draw upon everything he knew to be able to succeed. The challenge was formidable and, I imagine, probably underestimated by all concerned. He not only had to meet the expectations of The Economist Group Management Committee but he had a good number of colleagues and strangers watching him too. Some were very supportive and rooting for him. But inevitably there were others who were watching with a critical eye and ready to jump on anything that they did not perceive favourably. On top of that, Mike had assembled a team of people who had high expectations of their own. Some of them had made not insignificant sacrifices to be part of the team. It was important to them. So, whichever way you look at it, the stakes were high. Mike was a man exposed and, a bit like a premier league footballer, if he played well he would be adored by many, but if he made mistakes he would be jeered at and ostracised by the watching masses.

One of the tricks of creating a high performance team and delivering an innovation project is to pay enough attention to the task, the process, the team and the learning. When we are up against a very tight deadline as they were, it is very easy to get sucked into the task at the expense of all else. It is counterproductive to do that. The Red Stripe team were aware of this and tried hard to make sure that all aspects were attended to. Gerard Fairtlough and Javier Bajer helped them to understand, and stay conscious to, the task, the process and the team. David Laird and I worked with them on the process and task too and, as this account shows, they were serious about finding ways of working that would enable them to succeed. They created a learning culture, and learned that it is a prerequisite for an innovation culture.

I spent several hours with Mike and the team during the lifecycle of this project. It struck me that there were a number of different challenges and questions facing him and the team, including:

• How can a leader from a traditional organisational culture create an environment where his team (also from that culture) could become a high performing one within a very different paradigm (and within 6 months!)?
• How can that leader straddle the two worlds effectively throughout the duration of the project and reintegrate into the 'mother' culture afterwards?
• How can the team maintain their resilience when the very nature of their task means that they will have failures before they can have any successes?
• How does a team of people who have never worked together achieve such a challenging task in such a short time?
• To what extent and how does the leader and the team interact with the sponsoring organisation - what are the pros and cons of that?
• How can senior managers from the sponsoring organisation encourage and support the project when it also demands of them a very different 'contract' and way of working?

And finally, probably the most important question:

• How can the people concerned learn from this experience so that the organisation benefits and can apply the learning?

This final question is the one that can lead to the most value. All organisations these days have to be more innovative in response to the conditions at large: the fast-changing global marketplace, the political environment, emerging and unexpected competitors, more demanding consumers and more demanding employees. To my mind this short account about this small innovation experiment has a value way beyond its size. It is a valuable tool for anyone who is interested in delving into how on earth to create work cultures where people can experiment and innovate. This is the stuff that true learning is built from.

It is an accolade to Mike and the team that they took the risk to do this project. Aside from their own achievement and learning they have given others the opportunity to learn too. That is a vulnerable situation to put yourself in and can feel extremely exposing. I take my hat off to them all.

Sally Bibb

Sally is a founding director of the performance consultancy talentsmoothie ltd. and award-winning author of books like: A Question of Trust (with Jeremy Kourdi), The Stone Age Company and Management f-Laws (with Russell Ackoff and Herbert Addison). She is also passionate about Argentine tango. Find her here.