Teams At the Top

Why is it that we often see less team performance at the top of organizations than we see elsewhere? Despite the label "teams," top leaders tend to avoid teaming and the real progress is made behind closed doors, not at the team meetings. After writing The Wisdom of Teams, Katzenbach discovered there are special dynamics that characterize leadership groups at the top. Many times so-called teams are really working groups with a single leader--and often, these non-team groups at the top work pretty well. He explains that the solution doesn't lie in mandating teams or in changing top leaders' styles, or even in designing a better top team structure; rather, the key is in clearly differentiating between team and non-team opportunities and developing the capability to shift into different leadership modes, different leadership roles, and appropriate team membership composition depending upon the desired results. High-performing organizations require a balanced leadership effort that fully exploits non-team as well as team approaches.

Jon R. Katzenbach is a director of McKinsey & Company in Dallas. He is the co-author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller The Wisdom of Teams and The Real Change Leaders.