Category: Political Competence

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The Secret To Leading Teams: Balance

Yesterday, Professor Sam Bacharach wrote an article for Inc.’s blog, Leading Teams: Find the Right Balance Between Hands-on and Hands-off.

Teams are capable of executing large agendas–but they aren’t always productive. Too many voices can distract and one strongly worded opinion can lead to groupthink. Team leaders need to allow flexibilty, provide rewards, and encourage creativy while setting goals, meeting schedules, and getting things done.

It’s a delicate balancing act that requires careful thought. In the article Professor Bacharach mentions four ways leaders can strike the right leadership balance.

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Is Charisma Enough?

Last week Professor Samuel Bacharach wrote Charisma Is Not Enough. Great Leaders Execute for Inc.’s online blog.

Leadership isn’t about vision, personality, or bright ideas. As the article illustrates–it’s about execution and getting things done. Here’s an excerpt:

“As an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a person with drive and ambition, what you care about is moving from potential to execution and that means moving an agenda. Charisma and vision may get you in the door, they may even get you elected, but in  the final analysis, leadership is about execution.”

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Does Luck Matter?

It’s an interesting exercise to think about how people catch their “big break.” Usually we think of “big breaks” as cases of pure luck. It’s easy to think that a person only begins to “make it” after being in the right place at the right time.

But that’s hardly the case as MediaBistro’s series, My First Big Break, illustrates.  Success isn’t simply built on luck, it’s built on hard work, tenacity, and humility.

The series asks six big names in journalism how they “made it” and their stories are interesting, exciting, and illuminating.

Luck plays a role in a lot of these examples, but each person profiled worked hard to capitalize on their good fortune. Luck fell into the their laps, but they did something with it.

Catching a “big break” is more about the work you put into it–not the luck.

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Leaders, Russian Literature & Ping-Pong: The Value of Daydreaming

In a soon to be published paper in Psychological Science written by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara state, “creative solutions may be facilitated specifically by simple external tasks that maximize mind-wandering.”

In other words, daydreaming may help you solve complicated problems.

In a series of tests Baird and Schooler gave students tasks that required inventive problem solving skills. When the students were given a break half of them were told to sit and do nothing while the other half were given a tedious task–like reading  a dry passage from Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

When the break was over the group that had free time performed worse then the group who were told to complete monotonous chores. Why?

Those that were given a boring job were driven to daydreaming. They let their minds idle, wander, and explore whereas the group that had all the free time in the world busied themselves with more proactive thoughts.

To the researchers surprise the mind lost in daydreams isn’t lazy. In fact, it’s busy subconsciously untangling large, looming problems. As Jonah Lehrer of the New Yorker points out, this is the very reason why Silicon Alley businesses have so many ping-pong tables. Ping-pong, played leisurely, helps the mind wander while it addresses larger, more complex problems. It encourages productive daydreaming.

With this in mind, leaders need not feel guilty if they want to tuck into a bit of Tolstoy instead of checking their emails before bed. Taking time to yourself and allowing your mind to wander can help you figure out looming problems.

As an aside, if you’d like a ping-pong table at work, show this article to your boss.

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Team Leadership & Talent Retention

It’s easy to retain people. It’s not a big trick. Pay them fairly and well and they’ll hang around and do the work. HR specialists have mastered the skills of compensation. They can match your compensation structure to meet your organizational constraints, your organizational goals, the organizational personnel, and the resources the organization has available.

A rational economics approach to retention is straight forward. The problem is, at a certain point, a normative, psychological, approach may be even more important.

Sure, I can retain people with money, but that has a leveling effect. Retention through compensation does not guarantee commitment and personal investment. They’ll stay, but will they be committed and truly invested in your effort?

At a certain point, you’ve got to promise a bit more. Involvement, commitment, entrepreneurship, and risk taking requires not only an economic contract, but a social psychological contract.

That social psychological contract is created by leadership. Specifically, if you want to retain the entrepreneurs, the risk takers, the experts, and the great managers it will depend on your ability to lead. They will stay because they are recognized, engaged, challenged, developed, and optimistic.

You can retain zombies with money, but if you want to retain real organizational players, it’ll come down to the issue of your leadership.

Can you lead your team? Over and over again organizations debate the issue of retention by restructuring retention programs, playing around with the compensation systems, etc. But individuals do not necessarily stay because of the organization. They will stay for their team, they will stay for their team members, and they will stay for their team leaders.

Therefore the retention challenge is a team leadership challenge.

The better the leadership, especially at a group level, the greater the probability of retaining talent.

This is especially true in recent years. As the social contract between employees and their organization has broken down, it has been somewhat replaced by the personal, informal contract that emerges between employees, their teams, and their team leaders.

No longer is the sense of identity couched in the organization. Now it’s couched in teams. Employees speak of “my team” and “my group”; rarely do they speak of the organization with any sense of collective.

As such, team leadership training, which has always been an integral part in making organizations more innovative and creative, is also at the front line of talent retention.