In a structured environment, learning will be delivered by a team. A team has to be led and managed, hence there is a need for a designated team leader; yet in the adventure learning context, the members of the team also have duties of leadership and management, as they have to manage the learner experience, the session and the group.
A team is made up of a whole range of cultural backgrounds, ages, knowledge, skills and personalities, as well as an amalgam of relationships and interactions between its members. Human beings are social creatures by nature, but that in itself is insufficient to ensure an automatically successful team. The foundation of the nature of the relationship is the team culture, the shared meanings of the group that have developed through their combined values, beliefs and norms of behaviour. Team culture evolves as the team members learn about one another and find a way of working together. The individual members (the workers) find their place within the team, assuming a particular role that suits their character (Belbin 1993). Culture, though, does not develop entirely organically through the workers; it can be created, directed and managed by the leader as they work to mould performance. Culture represents constraints and performance expectations, therefore the power relationships that exist between the tiers of the organisation hierarchy. The leader has a responsibility to ensure that adventure learning sessions are adequately prepared, run on time, are appropriately equipped and that the workers are present as required to deliver the learning. However, the leader also has an emotional responsibility towards their workers, ensuring their morale is maintained, motivating them, encouraging them and keeping them engaged within the team and with the work. Accountability for performance and quality ultimately rests with the leader, but so too do technical skills, role modelling, group process management, judgement and overall decision making.
Newcomers into a team exist initially on the fringe until they learn about accepted behaviour and norms, gaining in familiarity and becoming increasingly accepted by existing members as they become integrated into the fold, a process known as legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger 1991). However, culture is evolutionary. For teams to thrive, culture must be allowed to change over time; team composition (tenure, age, membership) changes as members leave and others arrive, thinking and attitudes change, or else the team can become ‘stuck’ and ineffective, out of step with other teams in the organisation or unable to remain productive. Leadership is an emotional relationship as much as a functional one, an association between those who wish to lead and those who choose to be led. From the worker’s perspective, their approach to their role is defined by the team culture and the way that they feel about their colleagues, their team leader and the tasks they are required and expected to perform. It is a complex mix of emotional, psychological and material rewards that make this up. Workers have the same responsibility to develop a positive relationship with each of their work colleagues as they do with their team leader. The way people work together dictates how far they can learn together and from each other, which ultimately benefits the team as a whole. However, there is a danger, particularly in small teams, that the unit becomes stable and too comfortable, a homogenous entity that loses the capacity to perform, which sits with allowing the team culture to evolve. Developing existing staff and recruiting new staff brings new knowledge into the team, challenges existing ways and provides opportunities for team learning. Leaders must challenge and question, as well as inspire and support. The leader can challenge the culture of the team, but so can newcomers. The leader deliberately sets out to question and to ensure effectiveness by ensuring the team culture is conducive to performance. Newcomers challenge through simply thinking differently and questioning why the culture is the way it is, why a particular practice exists. A measure of challenge is constructive to ensure active engagement and optimal performance.
A leader is not dictatorial or always directive, but must capture the heart and mind of the individual worker, making them want to follow, rather than having to obey. Successful leaders concern themselves as much with the people they lead, their motivation and development, as with the operating systems and hierarchical structures. The greatest synergy may be said to exist within a structure that allows interdependence of the worker and the environment in which they operate, with the workers and their leader collaborating closely, co-ordinating behaviour and activity to unite as a whole. Within such a framework, the fate of the worker is associated with the fate of the team and such interdependency is what makes for the most effective performance; when the goals of the worker are synonymous with those of the team, everyone works to maximise performance. There is a lot of literature that explores the nature of teams and groups, and how these may be defined. However, the way in which a group defines itself and whether it defines itself as a team or not is less critical than whether it has a clear purpose, whether it has goals and whether it adds real value to the organisation to which it belongs. The designation does, however, offer an important contribution to unit identity. If the members identify themselves as a single unit, they share objectives and fate, working for collective survival and to the success of the whole; if the members identify themselves as individuals within a disparate collective, their interest is in self-preservation, rather than unit success. The leader plays a crucial role in developing the culture such that the workers see themselves as a part of a bigger entity and not isolated individuals.
Work forms a large part of life for most individuals and this is the arena in which people tend to seek to achieve the highest recognition they can. All workers have their own unique objectives for performing, their motives to work, hence the basis of their motivation; when these objectives align with those proposed by the leader, shared objectives are created. Motivation derives from personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of needs (Maslow 1943). However, satisfaction of need and motivation are not always synonymous as people also act through free will, which by definition cannot be manipulated. Historically, pay (extrinsic reward) was the prime form of reward, with little or no regard for whether a worker found emotional or psychological fulfilment. The role of the leader was to elicit absolute compliance without question. In modern society, pay is no longer an adequate motivating factor, there has to be intrinsic, as well as extrinsic, reward (emotional and psychological fulfilment).
The unique objectives of individuals define their psychological needs and denote their drive to follow a particular life path: a profession or a vocation. It is likely that within a team working within the same field, all will have similar drives, although each will experience varying degrees of the different drivers (Herzberg et al. 2008). It is the leader’s role to manage these into a symbiotic and effective model of team working. Being a leader can be a lonely role; the leadership function demands personal strength and awareness, the vision, self-confidence and stamina to argue for what is right for the team or the organisation, not necessarily for what is popular. The leader has also to have the confidence to delegate, having trust in others to do what they should, as they should and when they should. Without this, the leader does not show the competence and inspiration that workers seek when they are deciding whether to engage in the relationship. Workers seek mutual respect with their leader and want them to demonstrate confidence and credibility; inspiring a shared vision of performance in which all can share and to which all can contribute.
In the same way, the participants to the adventure learning experience seek leadership from the adventure learning instructor, who becomes a leader in their own right ‘in the field’. The instructor exists in a ‘community’ alongside adventure participants, while engaging in an activity, becoming a situated leader but that position is negated in the context of their existence within the wider team, where they must defer to the designated leader. The appointed leader must be recognised as such and retain their authority and control, or else the complex and fragile affiliation between leader and worker can break down. Such shared leadership is known as ‘distributed leadership’ (Harris and Spillane 2008) and may be considered necessary for teams involved in activities such as adventure learning to function, but strong trust relationships are essential, for permitting too great a devolution of power down to the workers risks workers becoming disengaged from the team, resulting in outcomes failure. To succeed, however, part of the development of the individual worker must consist of fostering necessary leadership capacity, or else the system can fail. Within a professional partnership, there have to be clear roles and accountability; communication in a functioning partnership fosters positive working, openness and honesty. Otherwise, it becomes too easy for a partner to withdraw; learners can only derive the most from their engagement if they know that all elements of the partnership are interlinked and that all are supportive of them, watching them, helping them and experiencing the session alongside them.
Belbin, R. M. (1993) Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
Harris, A. and Spillane, J. (2008) Distributed leadership through the looking glass. Management in Education 22(1): 31–34.
Herzberg, F., Mausner, B. and Snyderman, B. B. (2008) The Motivation to Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Lave, J. and Wenger. E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maslow, A. (1943) A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review 50: 370–396.