Teaming for Sustainable Leadership

But what do we know about high-functioning teams? How do we cultivate and develop them?

What We Know about High-Functioning Teams: The Power of the Pride

South African naturalist and organizational consultant Ian Thomas has written and presented on the topic of The Power of the Pride — How Lessons from a Pride of Lions Can Teach You to Create Powerful Business Teams. What he has learned from a life of observing lions "at work" in the bush presents a powerful analogy for organizational teams (once one gets past the fact that lionesses do all the work while the males spend their time marking territory and scaring off trespassers):

• There is a flat social structure in a lion pride, with powerful individuals who are dependent upon one another to achieve their common goal — in the pride's case, finding and subduing prey.
• The mission is simple. The goals are direct, clear, and compelling.
• The team incentives are clear: the success of each individual is the team’s success; the team’s success brings benefits to each individual.
• Powerful teams are made of knowledgeable, dedicated, team-oriented individuals: There is no secret formula for making strong teams from weak or uncooperative individuals. If you don’t pull your weight, the team suffers.
• There is a natural allocation of duties, based on skills. With lions, the older females bring experience, maturity, and superior strength to the hunt; the younger females bring speed, agility, and energy.
• Success depends upon communication. Over time, with a stable team, the communication is sensed and communicated intuitively. Once one lioness senses prey, the others immediately sense their responsibilities and begin to execute them.
• Training is intense and thorough. Cubs are initiated into the pride with love and play and mentored into their future roles. Strict survival selection of those who can contribute to the team ensures there are no "passengers" on the team.

While there are obvious differences between organizational teams and lion prides, the principles worth emulating are apt — but too often ignored in school leadership or management teams.

How to Cultivate and Develop High-Functioning Teams

The first step is to start thinking about a school's leadership in terms of teams, not individuals. Once one makes that distinction, then the evaluation of leadership should include prominently the evaluation of the team and each individual's contribution to it. In one's primary domain, one might be exceptional, and, yet, in terms of commitment to the team, one might also be the albatross that prevents the team (and thereby the school) from advancing the agenda as strongly as it should. Think of the popular coach or teacher who is also dismissive of colleagues and school policies. With the team concept, talented individuals must learn to align their talents with the team goals or move on. In schools, a talented team trumps a talented individual every time.

How does one actually assess the team? Fortunately, some organizations have been doing this for a long time, and there are professional consultants and evaluation instruments readily available to undertake just such assessments. The best of these instruments assess each individual team member's skill sets and attitudes, then plots each individual on a matrix with all other individuals on the team. For the school leader, such assessment makes two things obvious: (1) what assignments should be given to individual team members, based on their strengths and weaknesses; (2) what team strengths need to be capitalized upon and what weaknesses ameliorated. For example, if everyone on the team is strong at advocating the school's mission and goals, the team has a strength to leverage. If some team members are good with communicating and others are terrible at it, then the school leader should assign tasks that require communication accordingly. If no one on the team is good at teaming, then working on team dynamics would be time well spent.

Once we know our team strengths and weaknesses, how do we find the time and energy to come to terms with them and grow as individuals and as a

The granddaddy of such experiential educational leadership undertaking is Outward Bound. Schools that take leadership teams on such experiences typically return transformed as individuals and as a team — and the shared experience becomes incorporated as a reference point for years after. Another such crystallizing experiential education foray that the National Association of Independent Schools has undertaken — and will begin to offer to school leadership teams — is The Gettysburg Leadership Experience.

Held at the site of the turning point battle of the Civil War, The Gettysburg Leadership Experience (a two-day exercise) uses a case-study approach to assess decision-making and teaming under fire. Participants walk the various battles and deconstruct decisions made in the field by the Union and Confederate armies’ leadership. In preparation for the experience, the leadership team reads Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels and watches the documentary Gettysburg. Walking the battlefields and considering the options the various generals had at critical points in the battle is extraordinarily compelling — and the lessons for team-building quite clear:

• As General Eisenhower said on the eve of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, after months of excrutiatingly deep and detailed planning: "Plans are nothing; planning is everything." What Eisenhower recognized was that once the first shot was fired, chaos prevailed; what counted was that the resources were available to leaders in the field who knew and trusted one another and who could make the right instantaneous judgments under impossible and chaotic conditions.
• The importance of sublimating one’s own ego to that of the cause: Lincoln and Lee were the masters of this. Unfortunately for the Confederate Army, General J.E.B. Stuart, leader of Lee's cavalry, motivated to make a name for himself and off on his own pursuits, became separated from Lee's army, and left Lee effectively "blind" for the opening chapters of the battle.
• Fortune favors the bold. Lee's men revered him, in stark contrast to the Union army's distrust of its leadership, and Lee's boldness had, up to the point of Gettysburg, provided a string of improbable and remarkable victories. Gettysburg offered a series of decisions where leaders from both sides could have been (in some cases) and were (in other cases) bold. The lesson for leaders: What are the conditions that leadership creates to encourage boldness? When should caution trump boldness? How do we know the difference?
• The relationship and communication between a leader and his or her subordinates is critical. Obviously, this was true at Gettysburg. Lee had been devastated by the loss of Stonewall Jackson. Communication between Lee and Jackson had been intuitive. If Lee made the most general of observations, Jackson read exactly what Lee hoped for — and would take that as a direct order to execute. Lee made two critical errors at Gettysburg: First, he continued to communicate in general terms, expecting his leadership team to respond as Jackson had. His order to General Ewell on the first afternoon of engagement, to take Cemetery Hill "if practicable" was misread by Ewell as giving him the option to make a field judgment. That was not at all what Lee meant and not what Jackson would have interpreted as the order. The failure of Ewell to take the hill at all costs may well have cost Lee the battle, and, arguably, the war. Second, as the third and climactic day of battle approached, Lee made the decision to throw virtually all of his troops into a frontal attack, "Pickett’s Charge," up Cemetery Hill. Walking that formidable trek — and trying to fathom the fact that the Confederate soldiers knew that many, perhaps most, of them would die crossing the field to the stone walls protecting the Union troops — is a deep and awesome experience. General Lee’s confidante and second-in-command Longstreet was adamantly opposed to this strategy and repeatedly tried to persuade Lee not to attempt it, preferring a tactical retreat to fight again another day from high ground. The issue for leadership team deliberation is complex: What if, as second in command, you know your leader is about to make a costly mistake? How vociferously and tenaciously do you object? What if, as leader, you have never failed in such bold strategies before and, in your best judgment, believe this is the last best hope for your army to bring the conflict to a close? After the slaughter of the initial assault, Longstreet failed to send in the second wave — since he couldn't bring himself to order another doomed attack, and yet the first attack almost succeeded, with hand-to-hand combat at the wall at the crest of the hill, only to be turned back by Union reinforcements. When should a second in command change the plan and ignore the original orders? At what cost must you enthusiastically support a decision made by the leader and team even when you know it to be wrong?

Each morning our team walked the battlefield; each afternoon, we returned to the historic 1844 Antrim Inn to debrief what we had seen and learned and to apply it to our own challenges as a team and organization. As this brief accounting indicates, such team leadership training can help a team work through its own dynamics, set a standard for how the team is to work and communicate, and build loyalty to the team itself.

If schools are to become true learning organizations, the leadership team needs to commit itself to learning the essential elements for sustainable leadership: creating teams that develop a teaming instinct that acculturates itself. The lessons of the pride and of history tell us that strong, collaborative teams "feed" and inspire strong individuals. We are not hunting prey or fighting wars, of course, but schools do have highly complex, difficult, and vitally important missions. If school leaders can learn to build high functioning teams, the chances of a school's long-term success will increase.