Sweet Spots and Paradox
Separating and Connecting Work, Teamwork, and Leadership Conversations
Various writings on work, management, and organization tumble together terms that are remarkably similar, yet importantly, incredibly different in context. Most organizations that perform at exception levels have, unsurprisingly, some exceptional individuals. Those individuals are at work for much more than their jobs. Other individuals show up for work to do their jobs - and there still some whom others wish would not show up… These individuals all fit into a structure, and whether well defined or not -- it exists. Between all these individuals communication flows and teamwork happens, with success varying from 'wildly so', through mediocre, to failure or disaster. At the helm, the executives organize, strategize, lead, and hold each other and ultimately, all employees accountable.
All scholarly and business research takes a different angle on analyzing the ‘how’s and ‘why’s of it all; there is very often some notion of a sweet spot and a paradox. With regard to organizational structure, too little creates uncertainty and people are unsure of what their work actually is and how it can be done. With too much structure, people spend too much time dealing with too much bureaucracy and their creativity and productivity suffer. There is a sweet spot, an amount of structure that allows for people to know their work, without being hindered by an overbearing structure. Elliot Jaques’ work in Requisite Organization (RO) describes this as a ‘natural amount of organization’ that frees creativity, allowing for productivity and good function; however, his empirical methods seemed to focus more on organizational change in operationally focused businesses rather than building from a company’s inception.
In broader looks at what works really well with organizations, Jim Collins partnered with various authors and researchers to study multiple companies, looking at business practices of enduring companies in Built to Last and at the failure end of the spectrum, How the Mighty Fall. He and his researchers distill five levels of leadership in Good to Great, without much focus on structure at all. His latest effort, Great by Choice defines companies themselves as being “10Xers”, which are companies that have out-performed their industry-specific counterparts by 10 times or more, in times of uncertainty, and often, in chaotic market spaces and conditions.
Collins and his researchers focus on company performance; to both simplify and complicate our understanding of how companies can work well, consider that the most basic unit performing work is the individual. At the level of what might motivate individuals, Daniel H. Pink confirms that work itself, when done well, is an inherently satisfying human endeavor in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He describes a human need for purpose:
Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. The most deeply motivated people – not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied – hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.
In a nutshell, achieving worthwhile goals makes people happy; however, achieving goals with bad process has the dramatically opposite effect of damaging companies and teamwork, according to Collins in Great By Choice because process and systems are foundations of high performance.
Starting with the individual is part of A Systems Approach to Leadership by Geoffrey Coffey; and it matters, because individuals are the basic unit of performance – at a mine face, in the cafeteria, superintendents, community relations, executives, and everyone in between. Collins’s Levels of Leadership are useful here too, so for review, recall that these levels have been defined by excellence, (beginning with the individual):
Level 1: The highly capable individual
Level 2: The contributing team member
Level 3: The competent manager
Level 4: The effective leader
Level 5: The executive
Collins and his research team ask questions similar to Coffey’s “primary challenge” for leaders today… “How do you create sustainable high performance in conditions of high complexity and uncertainty?
This popular question of ‘how to get high performance’ can bring the discussion back to organizational structure. The corporate structure needs to exist in that ‘sweet spot’ of neither too much nor too little. Deciding how much structure is required is again, the work of individuals − in teams. Creating organizational structure is almost always a team effort, which means teamwork needs to be a high-performance activity. Knowing how to analyze teamwork performance, (and understanding that organizational success is often built upon the way teams work together) brings Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni into the discussion.
Through identifying and explaining these “dysfunctions”, Lencioni outlines how to overcome each, ultimately leading to excellence woven together with threads of leadership, communication, and supportive organizational structure. His model is based on trust, managing and harnessing the benefit of conflict, commitment, accountability, and focus on results. In general, these all fit tidily together with the leadership concepts detailed by Collins.
Answering the question of why teamwork matters is fundamental in being able to organize; because without it, getting the structure ‘right’ is impossible. Incredible amounts of work, discipline, conflict, analysis, and communication will have happened for a company to achieve the ‘greatness’ described by Collins and aspired to by companies looking for sustainable development. Defining the complexity of the work that needs doing is the company’s choice; crystallizing the concepts of levels of work complexity and keeping them from blurring with the ideas of leadership levels is vital.
Maintaining clarity of terms might seem trivial, but it will be useful when looking at systems because the process of work necessarily involves the work itself, and also leadership. For example, Collins refers to the first level of leadership being “the highly capable individual”, who might show up anywhere in the organizational structure. (Hopefully, the company is teeming with these!) Coffey’s Systems Approach to Leadership (SAL) asserts:
The Cognition-Systems Model of Organizational Performance can be used to represent any individual, at any level of an organization, in any formal or informal position, and the part of the organization they interact within a particular situation…such as CEO and entire organization, a business unit leader and business unit, or a team leader and team….[even] an individual without formal authority and the parts of the organization they interact with or can influence (p23-24).
In terms of business operation, both in the home office and at site, these ideas illuminate the benefit of looking at leadership in the context of the system because the benefits of understanding the complexity of the work being done at different levels together with leadership knowledge and practices will multiply the company’s ability to survive, thrive and possibly even sustain greatness in turbulent times.
Recognizing turbulent times requires awareness of both the external market environment in which the business operates, as well as the internal environment of the company. The first, the external market environment, is one over which no one really can exert or exercise any type of controls; it might be possible to forecast conditions or identify emerging trends, but influencing the external environment is a tough task. Rather than attempting to run the world, focus inward instead -- on running a healthy organization. Lencioni (2012) asserts another practical approach in The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, which can be used to provide more structure, strengthening the company’s ability to implement systems that work. The Advantage (2012) is the ‘how’ to the leadership and systems approach to ‘what’ business needs for high performance.
Making the case for a healthy organization is a practical expression of the underlying ideas held in common by all the business researchers and authors mentioned previously – without a healthy organization, excellent leaders and employees are lost, poor employees stay and poison the culture, systems fail to launch or function, even if the company remains. A state of mediocrity seems to be the loftiest goal of an unhealthy organization, in which it would be easy to imagine employees who look out for themselves while putting forth minimal effort, leaders scooping credit and assigning blame, and the overall motivation sags sadly…the motto would be “yeah…we’ll be back tomorrow”. Lencioni notes “most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. But the healthy ones tap into almost all of it.” (p11).
Organizational health, according to Lencioni, is based in leadership, teamwork, culture, strategy and meetings – none of which is new or unexamined on its own (The Advantage, 2012). Taking these elements out of theory and their isolation to bring them together as an integrated, practical discipline takes businesses from ‘talk’ to ‘walk’. Commitment and an overall, simultaneous, constant effort to put organizational health first make other efforts work. Lencioni outlines “The Four Disciplines Model”, in which each builds upon the previous:
1. Discipline 1: build a cohesive leadership team
2. Discipline 2: create clarity
3. Discipline 3: overcommunicate clarity
4. Discipline 4: reinforce clarity (p14, 2012)
If these disciplines seem repetitive, it is because they repeat; in other words, these things need to exist and happen always and over and over.
With the last word on how to work together, Ian MacDonald asserts that the Leader’s Question is not “what is the right answer?” but rather, “what is the right process to get this group of people to provide a solution?” (2018). As leaders strive to make their teams and companies not only work well, but work well and excel together, they need to carefully consider the people and systems they engage. The sustaining companies have low turnover, outrageous success, unusual cultures, and systems braced by their values.
Sources
Coffey, G. W. “A Systems Approach to Leadership Overview.” A systems approach to leadership, 2009, pp. 17-31., doi: 10.1001/978-3-642-01194-8_2.
Collins, J. Good to Great. (2001). London: Random House Business.
Collins, J., & Hansen, M.T. (2011). Great By Choice. London: Random House Business Book.
Collins, J. (2009) How the Mighty Fall: and Why Some Companies Never Give In. London: Random House Business.
Lencioni, P. (2005). Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Lencioni, P. (2012). The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books.
“The Rigour of Requisite Organization.” (2008). An interview with Ken Shepard, President of the Global Organization Design Society. Queen’s Industrial Relations Centre. https://irc.queensu.ca/articles/rigour-requisite-organization