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Team Building: The Myth of Senior Teams
By harveyrobbins | May 20, 2007
There is a seriously mistaken notion that senior teams function like other teams, just in a more senior way. That teams at the top - teams comprised of board members, CEOs, presidents, vice presidents, and other senior level execs - roll up their sleeves and collaborate in the same way that grunt teams do. They don’t.
Anyone who has been on a senior team knows how rare true camaraderie is. The senior team table more closely resembles a play from the Renaissance, with dukes and earls and grand viziers jockeying for advantage, than the kind of team we have been talking about. At the top levels, politics reigns supreme, and “team members” are there less to cooperate on joint action than to pursue constituent agendas.
This is partly because of the personality type that tends to rise to the top of organizations - Drivers with a bullet. Hard-charging executives prefer disposing to proposing, and they are typically rewarded for superior top-down, command-and-control performance. Except perhaps for the Vatican, large organizations do not turn to pastoral types for leadership.
But lets imagine a generation of powerful, collaborative-minded managers rose suddenly to the top - people who share information, swap skill sets, and set their egos aside to achieve common objectives. In fact, this will happen someday, and not far in the future. Generation X-ers and Y-ers are much more prone to team action than their Baby Boomer predecessors.
However, today’s corporations will not welcome these generations, and will throw up powerful resistance to them. Today’s organizations are modeled after patriarchal organizations established centuries ago, when leadership was envisioned in a singular, Driver-driven, masculine, competitive, Machiavellian way. Intrigue and manipulation are built into the charters of these organizations. To expect companies like IBM or Daimler-Chrysler or Harvard University to lead the way in describing a new kind of leadership by team, is to ask these organizations to go against their own natures.
Senior teams are “teams” in name only. They don’t act like real teams because they are really parallel teams of one, each with their own constituents. Real teams share roles and responsibilities whereas senior teams typically have parallel accountabilities. They are never able to prioritize goals since each member feels that his or her niche’s goals are the most deserving.
Oh, it’s sad and hypocritical. While top management encourages teamwork among the rank and file, they have no clue about it themselves. They can’t. They are constitutionally prohibited from engaging in it. So, when top management cannot practice what it preaches, why should the rest of us take the preaching seriously? Because it’s their job to point the way, to encourage teaming behavior. But, never, ever, look to top management to display teamwork. They can’t team. Collaborate, hopefully, but not team.
Well, perhaps never is too strong a word. We will with the passage of time see the development of true senior teams. But it will happen in smaller, younger organizations. And it will be lifetimes before the model takes hold in their Fortune 500 counterparts.
Topics: Team Building At Work |