Making Management Teams Work: Feedback is a Necessity, Not a Luxury
James M. Hunt
From BabsonInsight.com

A recent New Yorker article (Malcolm Gladwell, 7/22/02, "The Talent Myth") raised important questions about the role of talent and competition in management teams. The author proposes that talented people, encouraged to “do their own thing” were responsible for engaging in a variety of unethical actions and in the process destroying Enron. Indeed, consultants and academics familiar with leadership teams have been heard to say under their breath that senior management teamwork is a contradiction in terms. Such a resigned view is based on the notion that highly competitive, individualistic and achievement oriented managers simply can’t learn to work together. Like alpha males (though the observation is by no means limited to that particular gender) they will battle mightily until a “king of the hill” is crowned.

The problem with that view point is that it ignores the fact that there are many effective senior business teams including bright, achievement oriented, competitive people who have learned to work together. They have developed patterns of behavior that help them function effectively as a team, while not undermining the individual strengths of team members. Microsoft, Intel and a host of others illustrate that it can be done albeit in most cases not without work.

One critical behavioral norm that effective teams seem to have in common is the ability to give and receive feedback. They can talk about tough issues and in particular they can hold effective discussions about their problems and opportunities, their accountabilities and the processes by which they work together. It is possible, indeed desirable, for team members to say things like: “that idea won’t work for us,” “you’re not listening to me on this one” or “your people are going off in a direction that really isn’t true to what I thought was our vision.” They do that because they understand that they are all mutually responsible for the outcome of their shared efforts. Once that is clear, feedback then becomes an essential tool for helping teams and team members stay on track. If I am in any way responsible for your success then it is in my interest to be honest about what I think you are doing that is helpful, or not so helpful, to the cause.

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Unfortunately, good corrective or developmental feedback is notoriously absent from the lives of most executives. Their bosses don’t know how to give feedback or coach, don’t believe it is part of their role, are afraid that they will come across as micromanaging, etc. etc. The result is that executive “team” members too often “do their own thing,” manage their own unit or responsibilities as they see fit, and hear from others about their work only when their results are not up to expectation. They get no feedback regarding the process by which their results were achieved or how their results or processes relate to the bigger picture. Under these circumstances, talented executives can accomplish a great deal but the potential synergies that can be gained from a group of talented people working together as a team are absent.

What can the leader of such a talented group of people do to get people started down the path of working together? In the Leadership and influence program offered by the School of Executive Education at Babson we talk with executives about the concept of “shared responsibility leadership” (See David Bradford and Allan Cohen’s most recent book, Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership ). Shared responsibility leadership results when a team of individuals is committed to a tangible vision, the members are open to mutual influence (i.e. all team members including the “boss” can freely propose and debate ideas as well as offer one another feedback), and they all share responsibility for the pursuit of that tangible vision. In other words, it isn’t just the “leader” in authority who is responsible for making change happen, it is the entire team.

Not surprisingly, some participants are anxious about the prospect of sharing leadership. They fear that they will be abdicating the responsibilities of their role. The reality, however, is quite different. The shared responsibility leader aggressively manages team processes, making sure the right people are involved and making sure that team members work together in such a way so that they will develop a tangible vision to which all are committed. The shared responsibility leader also works hard to establish team norms that encourage mutual influence: patterns of interaction that encourage the open sharing of ideas and issues and team member to team member feedback.

Sounds good but we cycle back to the feedback problem again. How can the leader encourage the self-correcting give and take that is the hallmark of great teams? In our research on coaching managers (See James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub’s The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business ) we found that those managers who were good at coaching often built what looked to us like shared responsibility teams. One of their tools was coaching, including the use of feedback. They described several practices that any manager can use to build a “feedback positive” team:

• During the hiring process they look for people who can perform and who want to learn how to perform in new and/or better ways. In other words, they look for people who want to learn.

• They explain their management philosophy as part of the hiring/on-boarding process. They are clear about the norms that they are trying to promote and how they expect team members to use and support those norms. In other words, new team members are expected to quickly get up to speed with the process of helping one another: they should be open to giving and getting feedback.

• They ask for feedback, publicly. They look for others to coach them. They make it clear that they don’t have all the answers and that good ideas and useful observations can come from anywhere. (Of note, sometimes it isn’t easy to get feedback. Several coaching managers told us in effect “there are times when you have to smile and hold your temper.”) It is important to model a willingness to receive feedback with integrity. If you talk a good game about wanting feedback and attack others when you get it, the result will be cynicism and mistrust on the part of team members.

• They expect everyone on the team to be a leader. Several managers told us that they felt it was their responsibility, once the team or team members had decided upon a goal, to hold everyone accountable for reaching that goal. This stance encourages team members to think and feel like adults who are responsible for their own success as well as the stewards of the success of others. When adults feel fully responsible for the outcomes of their efforts, they are much more likely to face the anxiety associated with candid talk of successes, and failures. Much like a parent concerned about the welfare of his or her child, they know that facing problems squarely is a part of the job.

Talented people, acting autonomously, can indeed pull an organization apart if their talents are not channeled toward a business unit’s larger goals. We believe that a key responsibility of the boss is to make sure that doesn’t happen. It is probably important to remember that many talented individuals reach positions of responsibility by virtue of individual effort, particularly in the United States. Such a career development progression reflects the value placed on individualism in this particular culture. It can be hard work to pull together a talented group of individuals into a team. Those in authority must confront the uncomfortable reality that even though team members may be enormously intelligent and have great records of individual achievement, they may nevertheless need help if they are to learn to work together toward a shared goal.