Leadership Isn’t Just for Leaders
• Being on the same page helps the Rams win. Sean McVay, coach of the Rams, ensured that all members of the offense possessed a clear, common understanding (a shared mental model) of how to respond to certain situations. He ensured the team had clarity and alignment.
• Lack of accountability means loss of future business. In the Fifth Avenue retail store, the tailor attempted to hold the salesperson accountable for trying to sell Scott a poor-fitting suit. But because the team leader hadn’t held the salesperson accountable in the past, the salesperson repeated his detrimental behavior. The customer experience suffered, and Scott never shopped there again (a sad ending to this story!)
• You can’t teach height—a failure to garner “resources.” Our graduate school basketball team faced a severe obstacle—a lack of height and talent. But no one on the team tried to find other players to join us. We didn’t remove obstacles to success, and we didn’t garner necessary resources. As a result, we lost.
• It can be “lonely out in space.” During a space mission, crew members must keep an eye on their teammate’s emotions, encourage one another, and handle conflicts effectively. A failure to manage emotions and attitudes can erode the crew’s resilience and jeopardize the mission.
• The deadly consequences of poor psychological safety. On the Mount Everest climb, five people died because the team leader didn’t create psychological safety. (He told them, “My word will be absolute law.”) As a result, team members felt they couldn’t speak up when they needed to, and the lack of dissent was deadly.
• Participation and empowerment saved Scott from old man underwear. At Nordstrom’s, everyone on the sales team was taught that together they “own” customer service, so it was easy for Stewart to step in and help when Sue became busy with another customers. Together they enabled Scott to avoid the dreaded “old man’s underwear.”
• Truffles anyone? The best teams adapt and learn. At L’Atelier in Las Vegas, the leader ensured that every kitchen crew member, new and experienced, was fully trained, which enabled them to work together seamlessly. And adaptation was encouraged, so when the boisterous customers rolled in requesting “lots of truffles,” the team huddled up and quickly implemented a creative solution.
• You get what you encourage and tolerate. In a high-end retailer, a sales professional pretended to be on the phone rather than handle a customer return. It was only when leadership changed the conditions so they encouraged teamwork (and didn’t tolerate selfishness) that the sales professionals started working as a team.
This chapter is about coaching or, more specifically, team leadership. Note that we didn’t say the chapter focuses on “team leaders.” Instead, we said it is about “team leadership,” because team members other than the leader can at times demonstrate leadership behaviors that enable the team to succeed. We hope the chapter is useful to anyone in a designated team leader role, but it isn’t just about officially appointed leaders.
A great deal has been written about leadership, and most of it is unsupported advice offered by leadership “gurus.” Much of the leadership literature, and even most research on leadership, has concentrated on how to be a successful business leader or how to manage subordinates. In contrast, our focus in on team leadership.
Team leadership can be challenging, but fundamentally effective team leadership is about (a) ensuring the team has all the necessary “drivers” in place and (b) enabling the team to learn and adapt. So everything you learned previously applies here.
We begin this chapter by quickly referencing a few meta-analyses that highlight the importance of team leadership. We then identify seven essential team leadership functions that must be fulfilled on almost any team (we foreshadowed these in the opening stories). These functions, and related behaviors, describe much of what a good coach might do, and they move the needle on each of the other drivers. The functions tell us “what” needs to be done, but not “how” to do it.
Next, we provide a summary of four leadership approaches that suggest “how” to lead—three are based on strong research evidence (transformational, shared, and servant leadership) and one we derived based on our experiences (civil leadership). If you are familiar with these leadership approaches, feel free to skip that section and jump directly to the tips and implications at the end of the chapter. But we think you will discover some interesting insights about how to “show up” and maintain a healthy team leader mindset by reading about the four leadership approaches. Of course, we won’t hold it against you if you jump right to the punchline!
The short answer is yes, of course, it does. If you’ve been on various teams in your career, you probably know that from experience. The difference between working with a good team leader and a poor team leader is intense and obvious. But what does the research say about the impact of leadership behaviors? A couple of meta-analyses examined how leadership affects team performance.
Meltem Ceri-Booms, along with her colleagues from The Netherlands and Romania, published a meta-analysis of 88 research studies that examined the relationship between leader behaviors and team performance. Similarly, Shawn Burke and researchers at the University of Central Florida (including Eduardo, who was a professor there at the time), conducted a meta-analysis that combined the results from 50 leadership studies.
Each meta-analysis found that that appropriate leadership behaviors were positively related to various measures of team effectiveness, both subjective and objective. They found that task-focused leadership behaviors (e.g., providing structure) and person-focused behaviors (e.g., empowering team members) both contributed to team effectiveness. The findings held true regardless of the degree of interdependency that existed among team members. The evidence confirms what of us know intuitively—leadership matters in almost any type of teams.
Think about a really good coach on any sports team. It could be a team you or a family member played on or perhaps a professional team that you follow. Next, think about a really good team leader from work. While the two leaders may lead in different ways, we would speculate that both of them ensured that the “essential team leadership functions” were performed, either by themselves or by others on the team. For example, any good coach holds team members accountable, ensures team members are developing, helps remove obstacles, ensures team members are on the same page, and so on. As illustrated in the examples at the beginning of the chapter, when the essential functions are completed consistently, the probability of a team’s success increases significantly.
When we cut through all the noise, we see seven essential team leadership functions. You’ll find them listed in the following text, followed by a few key leadership behaviors associated with each. You could use these as a checklist for your team. Are these being performed adequately?
Task-focused
1. Ensure clarity and alignment.
2. Hold teammates accountable.
3. Remove obstacles and garner support.
Team-focused
4. Manage team emotions and attitudes.
5. Foster psychological safety.
6. Encourage participation and empowerment.
Team and task-focused
Based on what we know about the other drivers of team effectiveness, the right-hand column of Table 10.1 highlights a few key behaviors that a team leader (or other team members) can perform to ensure that each function is being completed adequately. Some of these behaviors should look familiar, as we alluded to them in prior chapters.
Table 10.1. Key Team Leadership Behaviors
| Team Leadership Function | Key Behaviors |
| 1. Ensure clarity and alignment. Teams are better able to coordinate and adapt when team members possess clear, shared, and accurate cognitions. Who is helping ensure the team has ample clarity and team members are aligned on things like roles and priorities? |
• Providing a sense of direction and developing plans to attain results • Structuring and distributing work • Maintaining situational awareness (e.g., monitoring the situation, updating) • Ensuring the team has shared mental models about roles, priorities, vision |
| 2. Hold teammates accountable. If no actions are taken to hold team members accountable for doing what they need to do, coordination and performance will suffer. Who keeps an eye on the team and recognizes when it may be starting to go off track? What happens when a team member isn’t living up to expectations or is demonstrating incivility? |
• Monitoring results and progress • Following up to ensure commitments are met • Ensuring team members are collaborating and communicating as expected • Dealing with jerks and underperformers |
| 3. Remove obstacles and garner support. All teams face obstacles and challenges. Who is helping identify and remove obstacles? Who is representing the team to ensure they have adequate resources and support? Who is maintaining healthy relationships with people outside the team? |
• Seeking necessary resources such as funding, talent, and support • Managing relationships with people outside the team (e.g., boundary spanning) |
| 4. Manage team emotions and attitudes. The research reveals that it is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain team effectiveness without the “right” cooperative attitudes. Who is monitoring the team’s pulse and helping manage emotions and attitudes? Who is energizing and inspiring the team? |
• Motivating and inspiring others (e.g., offering encouragement) • Fostering collaborative conflict (not avoidance or competitive conflict) • Building collective efficacy and cohesion • Demonstrating personal caring about team members |
| 5. Foster psychological safety. If you don’t recognize the importance of psychological safety by now, we have failed miserably! Without psychological safety, communication and performance suffers. Who is taking actions that help ensure team members feel comfortable speaking up and being themselves? |
• Admitting mistakes or a personal lack of knowledge • Encouraging alternative points of view (e.g., thanking people for speaking up) • Building trust (e.g., living up to commitments) • Being clear about negotiables and non-negotiables |
| 6. Encourage participation and empowerment. No one can see and do everything on a team. In effective teams, ideas and contributions emerge from throughout the team, and team members feel empowered to step up and help one another. Who is encouraging team members to participate and take ownership for the team’s success? |
• Actively seeking input from others • Ensuring team members are willing to back up one another • Encouraging shared leadership and “stepping up” • Building a sense of engagement and ownership |
| 7. Promote learning and adaptation. The best teams become great by continually learning and adjusting. That is the only way to sustain team effectiveness. Who is helping individual team members learn and develop? Who is ensuring that the team learns and adapts over time? |
• Monitoring team member’s needs • Fostering individual learning (e.g., coaching, feedback) • Enabling team learning and adaptation (e.g., debriefing) • Ensuring team members have the competencies needed to coordinate effectively |
A key focus for any team leader should be to ensure the key drivers for their team are favorable. How does performing the essential leadership functions move the needle on the other drivers? Table 10.2 shows the primary impact each function has on the other drivers.
Table 10.2. Leadership Functions and the Other Six Drivers
| The Other Six Drivers | ||||||
| Leadership Functions | Capabilities | Cooperation | Coordination | Communication | Cognitions | Conditions |
| Task-focused | ||||||
| Ensure clarity and alignment | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Hold teammates accountable | ✓ | |||||
| Remove obstacles and garner support | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Team-focused | ||||||
| Manage team emotions and attitudes | ✓ | |||||
| Foster psychological safety | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Encourage participation and empowerment | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Team- and task-focused | ||||||
| Promote learning and adaptation | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
The essential functions and related behaviors describe the “what” of team leadership. Now, let’s consider the “how.” What can we learn about effective team leadership from a few evidence-based leadership approaches?
We’re confident that leadership has been “studied” for as long as there have been leaders. When the first hunter-gathers formed a team, team members probably observed Ogg, their team leader and tried to grok (i.e., understand): “Why is Ogg assigning Rokk to the hunting party?” Historians have studied leaders through the ages, asking, for example, was Julius Caesar a good leader? Was Peter the Great actually great? What about Steve Jobs? And employees in modern organizations have “studied” their leaders to decide if they want to keep working there and perhaps to ascertain how they too could become a leader someday.
In the 20th century, anecdotal study and reflection morphed into academic theorizing and research on leadership. Since then, we’ve seen a proliferation of ideas about how to be an effective leader, including trait theory, great man theory (introduced at a time when it was assumed women wouldn’t be leaders), contingency theory, authentic leadership, charismatic leadership, leader–member exchange theory, ethical leadership, and situational leadership, to name a few. We won’t bore you with an historical recap of all of these. Nor are we going to tell you to adopt a particular leadership approach. Instead, we’ve tried to extract what can be learned from a few empirically tested approaches to leadership (so you don’t need to read it all!), starting with transformational leadership.
Transformational leadership is about leading by inspiring, stimulating, engaging, and caring for people. It is often contrasted with transactional leadership, which relies more on the contingent provision of rewards, praise, and punishment. You can think of transactional leadership as more of a traditional carrot-and-stick style of leadership designed to engender compliance. As a transactional leader, I’ll tell you what I expect, and if you do it, I’ll reward you. In contrast, transformational leadership involves motivating and engaging people to believe in and contribute to a team’s collective success. It is about building trust and commitment. Perhaps you’ve been the “recipient” of both styles of leadership in your career. Most leaders exhibit a bit of both, but tend to default to one more than the other.
Transformational leadership was originally introduced by presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns. The underlying elements of the theory were subsequently fleshed out by renowned leadership researcher Bernie Bass. According to Bass, some of the core behaviors of transformational leadership include communicating an inspiring vision and sense of meaning, challenging followers to question assumptions and live up to high standards, and encouraging them to believe that collective success is possible. It also involves attending to each team member’s needs through listening and coaching, and connecting with people on an emotional level.
Theoretically, transformational leadership sounds good (who doesn’t want to feel inspired), and it is certainly different than transactional leadership, but does it work? Several meta-analyses have examined that question. For example, Gang Wang, In-Sue Oh, Stephen Courtright, and Amy Colbert examined 113 transformational leadership studies. They found that transformational leadership was related to higher individual and team performance. At the individual level, people exposed to transformational leaders exhibited better basic task performance, but not necessarily better than those exposed to transactional leadership. Both leadership approaches seemed to yield conformance to basic expectations. Transformation leadership differentiated itself from transactional leadership in how it affected performance beyond basic task expectations. Transformational leadership seems to encourage individuals to go the extra mile, to voluntarily contribute in ways that extend beyond their basic job duties and role expectations.
How did transformational leadership play out at the team level? Transformational leadership was related to higher overall team performance. It yielded higher team performance even after accounting for transactional leadership behaviors (i.e., the use of contingent rewards). That feels right. Effective team performance is more than the sum of each person doing their basic job role adequately. It often requires coordination, helping teammates when needed, caring about the team’s goals (and not just whether I’ll get my reward!), and believing the team can “win.” Aspects of transformational leadership align nicely with those teamwork requirements.
On the “softer” side, Diego Montano from the Institute for Medical Psychology and Sociology at the University of Göttingen in Germany and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis that revealed transformational leadership was also related to employee mental well-being (e.g., less perceived stress and burnout). This suggests that there is a positive emotional component to working with a leader who exhibits a transformational leadership approach. Overall, there is strong evidence in support of transformational leadership. Here are a few useful lessons we can extract some from the research.
• If you need more than compliance, a transactional reward and punishment style of leadership isn’t enough.
• Establish a positive, inspiring sense of direction and a collective purpose that the team can believe in (consider involving the team in its creation).
• Create high standards that team members care about and challenge them to determine (and redetermine as needed) how best to attain them.
• Listen attentively to uncover individual team member needs and ideas.
• Model what you expect from the team (e.g., collaborative behaviors, cooperative attitudes) and do what you say (trust is at the heart of transformational leadership).
• Remind them that the team can win.
We’ve see these transformational leadership behaviors in many organizations. One example was at SEFCU, a credit union with over 350,000 members and $3.5 billion in assets. Founded in 1934, they operated as a typical financial institution for many, many years. Then, in 2007, their CEO Michael Castellana encouraged the leadership team to change their focus and purpose from “dollars and cents” to “lives impacted.” Castellana established a compelling sense of direction that emphasized making a big impact in the communities they serve, while still attaining financial success. He challenged his team (and, in turn, they challenged their teams) to attain some big goals, consistent with the vision. He involved the team in figuring out how to make that possible, and when the financial markets tightened, he reminded them about the importance of their mission and how the team could still succeed. Since adopting this approach, SEFCU has been voted the best financial institution in their region for 13 consecutive years.
The term shared leadership is not intended to describe the assignment of multiple formal team leaders. Nor is it running the team as a democracy, with no leader. Rather, it reflects that in many teams, including those with a formal leader, different people may step up, often informally and dynamically, to perform some leadership functions and help the team succeed. Leadership expert Gary Yukl (who was a darn good team leader in his own right, as Scott experienced back in the day) said shared leadership is about “individual members of a team engaging in activities that influence the team and other team members.” This is consistent with a central premise of this chapter—leadership isn’t just for leaders.
Is it feasible for one person to see everything that is going on within and to a team? Can the leader recognize, guide, and respond to all emergent challenges and team needs? In most teams, the leader can’t do that alone. Work has become increasingly complex and fast-paced. Organizational structures have become flatter, which means team leaders have more direct reports, widening the range of who and what must be “managed.” There is often too much going on for one person to set direction, monitor the environment, check in on each team member, manage external “boundary” relationships, model team norms, mentor others, provide expert guidance, hold team members accountable, mediate conflicts, offer feedback, and so on. Even if one person could see it all, they probably wouldn’t have the time to respond to it all. And even if they did have the time, they might not be the most qualified person on the team to perform each of those tasks. A leader would need to have superpowers to do it all well. That’s why we’re seeing more distributed or shared leadership, even within classic vertical leadership structures. In most teams, different members need to perform some “leader-like” actions.
Some degree of shared leadership will happen naturally in most teams, but should we be encouraging it? Does shared leadership benefit or weaken a team? Our friends, Lauren D’Innocenzo at Drexel University, John Mathieu at the University of Connecticut, and Mike Kukenberger at the University of New Hampshire conducted a meta-analysis of 50+ shared leadership studies, which revealed that teams that use shared leadership are more effective. Another meta-analysis of 40+ studies, conducted by Dani Wang, David Waldman, and Zhen Zhang reported similar results. While there were some subtle differences between the two meta-analyses (e.g., inconsistent conclusions about whether shared leadership becomes even more important when work is very complex), there is ample evidence that shared leadership can enhance team members’ attitudes and the team’s performance.
There is also reason to believe that it is harder for a team to adapt quickly when all leadership actions must flow through and be performed by a centralized, formal leader. Shared leadership should allow a team to adjust more rapidly to emergent needs. The musical world provides an interesting illustration of this.
A string quartet is typically comprised of a first and a second violin, a viola, and a cello. Traditionally, the first violinist is considered “the leader,” but many quartets now operate with more of a shared leadership approach. Alan Wing from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom led a team of researchers in a study of two internationally recognized string quartets. Each quartet played an excerpt from Haydn’s quartet Op. 74 no. 1, with intentional but unrehearsed variations in timing. In one quartet, team members adjusted only to the leader, and the leader rarely adjusted to the team. In the other quartet, adjustments were led by all four team members, and not simply the first violin. The differences in how the teams adjusted was attributed to their different leadership styles. The first quartet was a first-violin–led autocracy; the second quartet regularly operated in more of a shared leadership style.
Recently, Dominque Tremblay and a team of nurses, doctors, and researchers in Canada considered how shared leadership can apply to a “team of teams.” They examined the case of a 47-year-old woman who underwent therapy to treat breast cancer, and the coordination and communication challenges that emerged as responsibility for the patient moved from oncology to primary care teams. The case highlighted the need for shared leadership not only within medical teams, but also across teams (including the “patient family team”). Shared leadership was applicable wherever there was a need to coordinate, communicate, and adapt together to ensure quality care for the patient.
In some cases, a leader can assign an informal leadership responsibility to a team member (“Jess, could you please coach Joe so he’s prepared to handle that tricky Thompson account”). Often, however, shared leadership emerges more spontaneously when a team member recognizes and responds to a need. In either case, for shared leadership to be constructive, team members must be aligned on the team’s purpose and norms and mutually aware of what’s going on and where the team is headed. In other words, they need a foundation of shared cognitions. Otherwise, a team member who is genuinely trying to help can unintentionally derail the team.
Heather McIntyre and Roseanne Foti studied intact teams who exhibited shared leadership. They found that teams that possessed a common understanding about shared leadership performed better. That makes sense. If I think my leader is the only one who should give us guidance, I probably won’t respond well to a teammate who tries to “help me” by providing feedback. Shared leadership works better when team members aren’t surprised when one of their teammates “steps up” and performs what might normally be considered a task done by the formal leader.
A certain degree of vulnerability or exposure arises when a “nonleader” starts to act like a leader, so many team members may be reluctant to fill a leadership void without permission to do so. A team member might think, “Am I really supposed to represent our team when I interact with that senior leader? Perhaps it’s best if I just listen quietly and take notes.” The formal team leader can help by communicating where shared leadership is expected, where it is acceptable, and where it is off limits. When shared leadership is undefined and unbounded, we tend to see two extremes. On one hand, some team members will never step up, even when needed. They don’t know that they should, so they are fearful of overstepping and getting in trouble (or alienating a teammate). At the other extreme, some team members will step up inappropriately, assuming it is okay to take an unacceptable action, such as making a commitment on behalf of the team that they should not have made. Shared leadership works best when boundaries are clear and team members are empowered within those boundaries. And sometimes, a leader needs to communicate individual boundaries, because what is acceptable for one team member should be off limits for another.
Actions that promote psychological safety can also create an environment where shared leadership is possible. Psychological safety can increase the likelihood that a team member will voluntarily assume a leadership responsibility. It also makes it easier for a team member to be open to a teammate stepping up to fill a leadership need.
If you are a team member rather than a team leader, you might be thinking, “Sure, it can help my leader if I step up, but is it really in my best interest to help the team?” Robert Hirschfeld and his associates studied this for some time, differentiating between “team-oriented proactivity” and “autonomous proactivity.” The former is having an interest in making things better for the team, for example, by helping others perform in better ways. We see this as being related to having a collective orientation. In contrast, autonomous proactivity involves a focus on improving oneself and one’s own circumstances. Hirschfeld found that in team settings, individuals with team-oriented proactivity were seen as having greater advancement potential. Those with autonomous proactivity were seen as having less potential. This suggests that in addition to helping the team, there can be a personal benefit to “stepping up.”
In 1970, Robert Greenleaf published an essay titled, “The Servant as Leader,” which introduced the concept of servant leadership into the modern vernacular. His work was philosophical in nature and eventually led to research efforts to test some of these concepts in work settings. Fundamentally, “servant-leaders” are genuinely concerned with serving their followers and creating opportunities for them to grow and thrive. They look beyond self-interest and put others first. Some proponents of this approach have emphasized the role of humility in servant leadership.
We recognize that, at first glance, servant leadership may feel too “soft” for some. If transformational leadership seemed soft to you, servant leadership will make you roll your eyes. You might think, “That’s not leadership; that’s followership,” but servant leadership does not mean abandoning power, abdicating responsibility, or being submissive. It does, however, rely less on the formal power of being “the leader” and more on the trust that accrues from genuinely focusing on followers’ needs.
To be clear, we are not advocating that you adopt servant leadership as your sole or primary guiding principle for effective team leadership. We do, however, believe a few insights can be gleaned from knowing about it. But first, let’s confirm that there is ample research support for it.
Julia Hoch from Cal State University and her colleagues William Bommer, James Dulebohn, and Dongyuan Wu conducted an important meta-analysis of various leadership approaches, including transformational and servant leadership. They confirmed, with an even larger set of studies than in prior meta-analyses, that transformational leadership works. Transformational leadership is now one of the most studied and validated forms of leadership. So, Hoch and her team then examined the question, “If a leader is demonstrating transformational leadership, does servant leadership (or other forms of leadership) matter?”
There have been far fewer studies of servant leadership (41 studies) than of transformational leadership (over 150 studies!), but enough to conduct a reasonable meta-analysis. What did they find? Servant leadership demonstrated a positive relationship with employee job performance, a bit stronger positive relationship with employee organizational citizenship behaviors (i.e., going beyond one’s basic job requirements), and a very strong positive relationship with employee commitment and trust in their leader. In addition, they found that servant leadership predicts those positive outcomes, even after accounting for transformational leadership. In contrast, other leadership approaches didn’t add much to the mix. This suggests that there is a place for both transformational leadership and servant leadership and that adopting aspects of both could be beneficial.
To further compare these two approaches, Dirk van Dierendonck and his colleagues at Erasmus University in The Netherlands conducted a series of studies involving servant and transformational leadership. They found that both forms of leadership led to higher levels of employee commitment and engagement but that they operated in different ways. Servant leadership seemed to work because team members felt their needs were being satisfied, while transformational leadership seemed to work, in part, because team members viewed their leader as effective.
Similarly, Zhijun Chen from the University of Western Australia, along with Jing Shu and Mingjian Zhou, studied 238 hairstylists in 30 salons. They found that when the team leader demonstrated servant leadership behaviors, service quality was higher and customers felt their stylists were more customer-focused, even after accounting for transformational leadership behaviors. Our conclusion is that you’re likely to have a better experience at a salon where the leader isn’t a prima donna. Tell them Scott and Eduardo sent you.
Servant leadership begins as a mindset. Acknowledge that you have a responsibility to look out for your team and your team members. That’s a healthy perspective. If your team believes that you are driven mostly by your own self-interests, they are unlikely to trust you. In that case, you’ll only be able to use transactional leadership, doling out rewards and punishments to coerce people to comply. Transactional leadership has its place, but you don’t want that to be the only tool in your toolkit, particularly if you need your team to be engaged and adaptive and not simply compliant.
Be honest, if you are a leader and we were to interview your team members, would they say you are more concerned with their success or your own? We’re not asking about your intent, but rather how your team perceives you. To use an American football analogy, from their perspective, do they see you acting like the star quarterback, with the rest of them working to ensure you can deliver the goods? Or are you more like an offensive lineman, trying to protect them and remove barriers so they can “score?” There is a meaningful advantage to being perceived as the obstacle remover, at least some of the time. In contrast, if the team perceives that “It’s always about you,” you’ll find it hard to sustain long-term team success.
To apply servant leadership, take a genuine interest in the needs of your team members and at times put their needs above your own.
• Do something that is clearly not in your own best interest but visibly helps them. That builds trust and psychological safety.
• Show that you care about their personal growth. Listen intently.
• Look for obstacles that may be getting in their way and use the extra influence you have as a leader to help remove them.
• Roll up your sleeves and help out, occasionally doing something that might be perceived as “grunt” work. For example, Phillipe Cousteau, the President of EarthEcho International told Fast Company, “I still take minutes sometimes. Don’t ask people to do anything you’re not willing to do.”
When thought of in this way, servant leadership isn’t a radical approach, and it isn’t inconsistent with transformational or shared leadership. It is simply a component of being a good team leader. Incorporate a servant leader mindset as part of your repertoire. Doing so can help promote the emergence of cooperative attitudes within your team—trust, psychological safety, cohesion, and collective efficacy.
Remember how, in our discussion about the dark side of destructive personalities, a team member who demonstrates narcissism or is generally a jerk can infect the rest of the team, through a form of emotional contagion? It’s even worse when the person demonstrating those negative attributes is the team leader! Our theory of civil leadership has two main tenets: (a) don’t be a jerk and (b) don’t tolerate incivility in the team.
We wish leader incivility was like a unicorn, so rare that we never see it. If that were true, we wouldn’t need to discuss it here, but unfortunately we do. Christine Pearson and Christine Porath wrote a book on incivility at work, The Cost of Bad Behavior. They found that about 60% of incivility incidents are instigated by people with higher organizational status than the target. Top–down and leader-initiated incivility is actually more common than peer-to-peer incivility.
Leader incivility includes, for example, making demeaning or derogatory remarks about a person, putting someone down, or addressing someone in unprofessional terms. Hopefully you’ve never seen a team leader in your organization do those things (we can hear you chuckling). Amber Smittick from Hogan Assessments and her colleagues Kathi Miner and George Cunningham from Texas A&M gathered data from 52 NCAA Division I female college basketball teams. After controlling for past performance, they found that teams led by coaches who demonstrated more incivility won fewer games. Why? Because incivility lowered psychological safety, which you now know is a strong predictor of team performance. It turns out that leader incivility isn’t the unicorn; the unicorn is the leader who can be uncivil and somehow still maintain high psychological safety and performance. It’s almost impossible. So how can you apply civil leadership?
• Check yourself and don’t be a jerk. When you need to be tough, do so without being rude. Monitor your team’s emotions.
• Don’t tolerate team members who act unprofessionally to other team members. Don’t trick yourself into believing that a high-performing jerk won’t infect the rest of the team. He will, and your team’s “winning percentage” will eventually drop because of it.
• When team members disagree, which can be quite healthy, help them work through it collaboratively rather than competitively.
We’re not suggesting that you adopt a single leadership approach. You don’t need to declare that you are going to be a [fill in the blank] style leader. We described a few leadership approaches with strong research support and one that we invented but are fairly confident about. We think you can learn from each of the leadership approaches.
• Transformational leadership reminds us to inspire the team and not simply reward compliance.
• Shared leadership reminds us that if the leader is the only person showing leadership behaviors that’s probably a red flag.
• Servant leadership reminds us to put the team first.
• Civil leadership reminds us not to be a jerk—and not tolerate incivility in others.
Proponents of any of the major leadership theories would probably agree that it is hard to be an effective team leader if you don’t understand what your teammates are thinking and feeling. With that in mind, we want to alert you to a cognitive bias that you’ll need to avoid whenever you serve in a team leader role. It’s called self-anchoring bias.
Jennifer Overbeck from the University of Utah and Vitaliya Droutman from the University of Southern California published research that reveals what power can do to our perception of others. Across a series of studies, they showed that people in power are more likely to “self-anchor.”
What does that mean? It means they are more likely to use themselves to infer what other people think or feel. More specifically, Overbeck and Droutman’s research suggests that when people are in a position of power, they are more likely to assume that their team believes what they believe and feels what they feel. This doesn’t happen consciously. A leader doesn’t knowingly think, “I believe X, so my team must as well.” When you are in a position of power, your self-anchoring can increase without your awareness. Some of it may even be physiological.
Researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Toronto used transcranial magnetic stimulation to measure motor cortical output in the brain. They examined people who felt differing degrees of power. When they were in a position of power, they exhibited lower levels of resonance, suggesting reduced mirroring of other people. Apparently, something happens to us when we assume a position of power. We tend not to process as much information about others, particularly about those with less power than us. We have a harder time reading other’s emotions. And, due to self-anchoring bias, our natural inclination can be to assume we are “reading the audience,” when in reality we are merely reading ourselves.
Whenever you are in a team leader role, be on the lookout for self-anchoring. Ask yourself, “How confident am I that I really know what my team is thinking and feeling?” Then, acknowledge that you are likely to be overconfident and go talk to people on your team to learn their perspective. You may be surprised what you uncover!
Effective team leadership is primarily about (a) ensuring the team has the favorable drivers it needs and (b) enabling the team to learn and adapt. In this chapter, we described several research-tested approaches that have been shown to boost team effectiveness. We don’t advocate picking one, but instead we encourage you to learn from each of them.
• Periodically review the seven essential leadership functions and determine if any merit additional attention. Remember, it isn’t only the formal leader who can help fulfill these functions.
• If you need more than compliance, then a transactional reward and punishment style of team leadership will be insufficient.
• But, to be clear, adopting lessons from the other leadership approaches does not mean abandoning power, running a team democracy, or being submissive. Those approaches offer ways of engaging the team to produce better results, not abdicating leadership responsibility.
• Transformational leadership offers ways to build trust and inspire the team. Actions you can take include
• Establishing a positive, inspiring sense of direction and a collective purpose that the team can believe in (try to involve them in generating it, if possible).
• Creating high standards that team members care about and challenging them to figure out how best to attain them.
• Modeling the behaviors and attitude you expect from the team and doing what you say.
• Reminding them that the team can win (to sustain a sense of collective efficacy).
• Shared leadership alerts us that if the leader is the only person demonstrating leadership, that’s probably a red flag.
• It is rare that one person can set direction, check in on each team member, manage external relationships, model team norms, provide guidance, hold team members accountable, etc.
• Shared leadership works best when boundaries are clear and team members are empowered within those boundaries. Guide team members to “step up” in the right spots.
• As a team member, stepping up is good for the team, and it can also enhance your reputation for future advancement.
• Servant leadership encourages us to put the team first. Actions you can take include
• Doing something that is clearly not in your own best interest but visibly helps the team.
• Showing that you care about a team member’s personal growth.
• Looking for obstacles and using the extra influence you have as a leader to help remove them.
• Rolling up your sleeves and doing something that might be perceived as “grunt” work.
• Civil leadership reminds us not to be a jerk—and not tolerate incivility in others.
• To lead others effectively, you need to know what your team is thinking. Beware of self-anchoring bias. Don’t assume you know what they are thinking and feeling.
• Make it a practice to talk to your team members and listen intently.