Many of us have been part of a great team at one point or another. If not, perhaps we've witnessed a great team in action. Often, a great team achieves their level of greatness after many hours of working together – the sports team made up primarily of seniors who have played together since freshman year, for instance. Or, your favorite comedy team that has performed together so long they can literally complete one another's thoughts. At work, we may know a small group of competent professionals that can seemingly tackle any problem, working together like a well‐oiled machine.
What happens, however, when a group of people comes together for the first time and they don't have four years of practices and games to learn to work together, or even the luxury of a few months to work out the kinks? Is there any way to be highly productive beginning on Day 1? You may remember Amy Edmondson, who we encountered in Chapter 2 with the important idea of psychological safety. She sees this psychological safety as one of the key aspects of what she calls “teaming.” She contends that when individuals follow the same set of guidelines or rules, they can begin functioning as a highly productive team immediately. She calls this teaming rather than teamwork.
Agile leadership means ensuring that good ideas don't die on the vine, by making sure that each member of a group shares the responsibility for implementation. Each person may have a different kind of task to move the idea forward, but there are no spectators. Agile leaders keep the expectations for any individual person small, knowing that modest commitments gathered together add up to significant progress.
Great teams need great leaders, right? Well, yes and no. To explore this question further, let's focus on the term “leadership.” When you hear the word “leader,” who springs to mind? Maybe you envision a political or military figure, one living or one from history. Or, you may recall someone from the world of sports – a coach, perhaps. Others will think of a person much closer to home, someone who has touched their lives directly: a boss, a minister, or maybe a parent. Each of us will likely imagine someone different, with varied leadership characteristics and attributes; but most of us will be thinking about leadership as a quality that resides in a single person.
There have been many different single‐person models of leadership taught in graduate programs and written about in the books that line our shelves. Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey told us about “situational leadership.” Robert Greenleaf helped us understand “the servant leader” and Jim Collins wrote about “five levels of leadership.” All are different ways of thinking about leadership; all are based on the notion of the individual leader.
There is an evolution afoot in our thinking about leadership, one that doesn't focus on the individual; but, rather, on leadership as a shared characteristic of a group or a team. Shared leadership can give us flexibility in our groups and organizations when we are working on complex, strategic issues. We need others to join us in leadership to take on complex challenges.
Business educator and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith suggests that shared leadership is a way to maximize talent because it allows us to mix and match the best of individuals' leadership abilities to meet the complex challenges we face. He offers seven guidelines for fostering an organizational culture of shared leadership:
It's very likely that the next iteration of the great individual leader will be the leader who designs teams and organizations in which the leadership is shared, creating the capacity needed to manage the complex issues we face.
Perhaps the most visible, pragmatic example of shared leadership is a shared action plan. The plan needs to be documented in writing, not just left to people's powers of recollection. A Chinese proverb expresses it this way: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.” If you don't capture the conversation and put it into a form that can be easily retrieved later, the thinking and the agreements can be lost. An action plan lays out in detail what needs to happen next to keep moving forward.
In an action plan, members of the group take responsibility for the specific “to‐do's” that need to be done. We suggest that an action plan be limited to a short timeframe – say, the next 30 days. Why? Because if you're in a complex environment, things change rapidly. As in the kayaking example in the last chapter, time spent planning too far out is very likely wasted time.
An action plan is really a promise, a promise that words will match actions. Promises kept, even small promises, result in increased trust. Donald Sull and Charles Spinosa refer to this as promise‐based management. According to Sull and Spinosa, one of the reasons organizations face difficulty in strategy execution is the inability to develop clear commitments in a systematic way. This weakness is a function of the inability of leaders to build trust across an organization or a community.
We've discussed the notion of trust several times in this book. Promises, of course, are all about trust. Much has been written about the role of trust in teams and organizations. Suffice it to say that trust is critical to getting anything done together – much less the kinds of complex, adaptive challenges that many of us are struggling to confront. But how do you build trust at scale? One of the ways you do it is to ask for what we have come to call micro‐commitments. The effectiveness of micro‐commitments has been written about a good deal in the context of individual behavior. A significant retirement nest egg can be accumulated through small commitments of savings and investing over time. Health professionals know that big lifestyle changes to diet and exercise are nearly impossible, but smaller, incremental commitments tend to be more easily followed. Marla Cilley, better known as “FlyLady,” gained prominence a few years ago for her system of conquering household management, 15 minutes at a time. Likewise, when we mentor doctoral students through their dissertation process we always suggest following the advice of Joan Bolker in her book, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis.
Strategic conversations like the ones we've described in this book often result in actions that are in addition to what group members are doing on top of their regular job and/or life responsibilities. They're not in a position to commit hours to a new project – nor, at the beginning, do they trust the other members of the group enough to want to do so. We've found that micro‐commitments have a remarkable impact in these kinds of groups and teams. The agile leader asks for micro‐commitments, at least at first. We've noticed that group members' commitments will likely get progressively less “micro” as the group moves forward and sees progress being made, and members' trust in one another grows. Remember, our definition of trust is this: trust occurs when words match actions. Asking for micro‐commitments provides the mechanism for that to happen.
Shared action plans can move groups and teams into action immediately. Leonard Schlesinger, the former president of Babson College, sees the ability to take immediate action as vital in a world in which you can no longer plan or predict your way to success. Along with co‐author Charles Kiefer, Schlesinger makes several observations about the value of “doing” immediately. Doing allows us to quickly learn what works and what doesn't. If we never do, we will never know what is possible and what is not. Doing leads to reactions, which can lead us in other, sometimes unexpected directions. As we do, we will find people to come along side with us. And finally, doing will always lead us to evidence.
While it sometimes seems that the do‐ers are in short supply, in fact there are many people who would rather do than talk. To return once again to the bell curve in Chapter 1, with the pioneers and the soreheads on either end, these are the many pragmatists in the middle of the curve. Most people want to do, not just talk. One of our colleagues in Flint has what she calls a “two‐meeting rule.” When she is invited to meetings, she has a simple litmus test as to whether the meeting is worth her time – whether she walks away with a task to do. She says she may let one non‐action‐oriented meeting slide; but if she's asked to attend another of that group and there is no action being taken, she will not meet with that group a third time. That violates her two‐meeting rule.
Agile leaders like our colleague in Flint want to do things, not just talk about things. They understand the need for action undertaken by a group, in which each person understands that they share leadership toward the common goal.
While the action plan is straightforward, it's also easy for this step to go awry if careful attention isn't paid to the details. Each person should have something to do in the action plan – a promise they are making to the group. Sull and Spinosa suggest several attributes for good trust‐enhancing promises: they are public, voluntary, active, and specific. We've made that list a bit more concrete; when you're developing an action plan, you want to include everything that needs to happen in the next 30 days, and for each item you should specify:
Even though this kind of plan is all about shared leadership, an agile leader takes responsibility for putting it together. We suggest going person to person, asking for their commitment, calling each by name and making eye contact: “Javier, what can you do? Mary, what can you do? Bill, what about you, what can you do with an hour of your time over the next 30 days?” Everyone should leave the meeting with something to do. The only exception would be truly major life events or urgent professional responsibilities that are temporary in nature: a member is having a baby, is in charge of a national conference, and so on. In addition, while it's fine for someone to indicate that someone on their staff will help them with a task, their commitment of time should be their own. After the meeting, make sure that the plan is disseminated back to the group members quickly, within 24 hours if possible.
Why an hour? We've found that it's a good standard for a micro‐commitment. If each person spends one hour a month on the action plan, that is enough to generate significant progress. When five to seven people take individual small steps, collectively they take a large step. It is also small enough that it is difficult for people to say “No.”
Agile leaders know how to help a group move from talk to doing with commitments to take action. Agile leaders are not afraid to call on each member of the group to make at least a small commitment of time, understanding that these commitments, when taken together, help move the group forward, build trust, and illuminate the path ahead.