23 January 2020
How To Balance Teamwork With Authority
When we contemplate the modern teams or organisations, we automatically fast forward our thoughts to the 21st century of more diverse, digital and dynamically dispersed team members facing the integrated complex set of obstacles that hinge on their success rate. The new bandwidth contradicts to the teams of the past, which used to rely on using repeated terms of collaboration, coordination and communication, with often very little substance or merit behind.
Having been promoted to the leadership position, we all have, once in our professional career, encountered the contrasting spectrum of past and present team subtleties. Teamwork makes the dream work, but it is much harder to advocate for what actually makes the teamwork, work!
So How to be Effective?
Richard Hackman, a pioneering expert in the field of organisational behaviour, studying teams for more than 40 years, identified the basics that ground team effectiveness. His research strongly condemns the importance of personalities, attitudes and behavioural styles of team members in collaboration (Haas & Mortensen, 2016). Instead, what helps a team to thrive, are the three enabling conditions, which come under the umbrella of authoritarian leadership; a compelling direction, a strong structure and a supportive context.
Enabling Conditions for Effective Teamwork. Adapted from: Haas and Mortensen (2016).
Owning up to the position of a team leader, we have confronted all kinds of challenges, which might look small, but have a high impact on our team’s returns. Let’s explore in-depth, how to create a balanced climate that helps the modernised, diverse, digital and dynamically dispersed team attain high performance.
1. Compelling Direction
The foundation of every great team is the leader in authority. Yes, everything comes down on your shoulders! You’re the direction that rejuvenates, aligns and engages its members. Teams cannot be inspired if they don’t know what is expected out of them and what is their explicit end goal. It is on you to set those goals in a way that they are challenging but not as complicated that your team members become dispirited. However, ensure to make goals consequential for team members. They would then care about achieving it; whether the goals are attached to an extrinsic or an intrinsic reward system.
In this case, authoritative leaders, are the most effective. They are well-practised to provide clarity for the vision; thus, motivating members by showing how their contribution is significant to the company’s bigger vision. This type of leadership is one of the six leadership styles outlined by Danial Goleman in his framework of emotional intelligence. Accordingly, the framework refers to authoritative leaders, who have the ability to articulate a vision and direct members towards that common vision.
2. Strong Structure
It is the responsibility of a team lead to create the right mix and number of team members, associated with appropriate tasks that complement their skills. Every member is not expected to possess superlative technical and social skills; however, the overall team substantially entails a combination of both summits, and practice how to detect and appreciate wisdom through engagement. Our group of leaders have outlined tried and tested activities for you to get your hands on, to elevate your team to the next level today!
Diversity in terms of skills, opinions, perspectives, age, gender, and race are encouraged by the leader in authority. High-performing teams involve members who have a balance of skills. But it does not always ensure profitable returns. Diverse teams often come with costs attached to their communication, fragmentation and free riding aspect, because of lack of accountability. As executives, we often hear our team members lament that their department is becoming distended. The diversity of the modern team demands vigilance from authoritative leaders. Before adding a member in your already bloated team, ask yourself that what unique proposition will that individual bring to the group.
Tasks assigned to members should also be developed and designated with equal care. It is not necessary to bring creativity or innovation in every task; many might be accounted for a certain degree of drudgery. It is a leader’s responsibility to ensure that the task being delegated is motivating enough to keep the team member engaged from beginning to the end, and they have a certain level of autonomy to manage their work.
3. Supportive context
Guaranteeing that team members have the right kind of support is the third key element for an authoritative leader to enable team effectiveness. This involves keeping a reward system to promote citizenship behaviour, a shared information system to offer hassle-free availability of data for the completion of tasks, and a training & development system to secure resources required to do the job, such as assistance in terms of funds and technical aspects.
While as team leaders, we never get everything that our team requires to be the best, making it our obligation to start from getting the essential pieces in place. Providing supportive context to teams that are geographically dispersed and dependent on digital communication becomes a challenge due to the varying resources available within their dynamics.
Wait, There’s More!
Being in authority to pave way for balanced team success can smoothly be done through the aforementioned three conditions, as Hackman’s theory demonstrates. But CONQA’s research indicates that modern-day teams need something more. The dynamics of diversity, digital communication, geographical dispersion and mobility from one team to another, has made us prone to the mindset of ‘us versus them’. In order to adopt practices to override problems of modern teams you, as a leader, can:
Foster Common Identity - The issue of increasing competition and ‘us versus them’ can be solved through designing a system, which involves shared knowledge and mindset. CONQA’s team of authoritative leaders has listed down practices that can help you to foster common identity and understanding among your team members through active participation in our weekly workshops!
Evaluate your team on a certain collaboration criterion - For continuous success, CONQA recommends you to conduct a simple and quick temperature check off your team. After every few months, rate your team members, to carefully examine where your authority needs to be reinforced in order to keep up. Having trouble in intervening or assessing your team? Register with CONQA and get tips and tricks for quick interventions and assessments.