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Leadership Skills: The Myth of Leadership
By harveyrobbins | September 16, 2007
Leadership is the vessel for many of the worst team myths, for a logical reason. As keepers of the team vision, leaders make up a lot of stuff. Here are some of the worst illusions foisted on us by leaders about leadership
1. Teams require a single individual to lead them. It isn’t so. There are many models of team leadership, ranging from traditional iron-hand rule through various degrees of self-direction to apparent leaderlessness. Leadership can rotate by the clock, or by the task at hand.
2. Strong leadership ensures success. Again, it isn’t so. Strong leadership is useless if the people following the leader are incompetent or uninterested in the team task. A fundamentally bad team cannot be “led” – except perhaps to a place of execution.
3. How a leader is selected is not important. Wrong. Leaders must be selected in a way that is consonant with the task a team is assigned, and the kind of team he or she is assigned to. A free-wheeling, autonomous team will not welcome a leader assigned from outside the group. A new leader may have trouble adjusting to an established team. A team never previously allowed to make decisions for itself may be unable to choose its own leaders.
4. Team success is all that matters. In a narrow sense, sure, team success matters to the team. But team success, whether driven by a strong leader or not, is meaningless if the task was wrong or duplicative or wasteful or pointless.
5. Team structure is a secondary consideration. It isn’t. Every team structure and configuration we are aware of – functionally aligned, cross-functionally aligned, matrix, network, single-leader, multiple-leader, leaderless – is valid, when applied to the appropriate team task. Perfect leadership and perfect followership combined will still come to nothing unless the team is the right type of team for the task at hand.
6. A good leader and a good team can solve any task. Sorry – not every task is appropriate for team action. If a task shouldn’t be done by a team at all, it hardly matters who or how skilled its leader is. It’s easy to get carried away with team fervor, but it’s like the old saying, “When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”.
Topics: Leadership Skill | 1 Comment »
March 18th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
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