Wow! Was I ever thrown off by the assertion that "Virtuoso teams are not democracies: they have strong leaders that powerfully drive the team, its vision, culture, and the results. Despite their emphasis on individual accomplishment and performance, all of the virtuoso teams that we've looked at have, at their center a single strong leader." (p 3) This was kind of like being doused with a bucket of ice water and it contradicted what I typically think of in terms of complex issues tackled by intense teams that trade and share leadership as the circumstances demand. I'm still trying to get my head around the possibility that the virtuoso team reliance on strong leaders might not have to be antithetical to the adaptive leadership I usually embrace.
Can someone help me? Particularly looking at our own team experiences at Allerton. In all honesty, what did we have - strong leaders with a driving vision of what we sought to accomplish - or did we have shared and adaptive leadership that drew all our talent to the task? Or, maybe we didn't have a virtuoso team...
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Denny
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Dear Denny,
Forgive me for jumping-in uninvited, but I was struck by your impression above about leaders and VTs and what that means for shared leadership responsibilities, and how important it is to address. I’m one of the co-authors of the book, and I think that this is a great question. First of all, I think that it’s fair to say that we were surprised, as well, by the importance of a leader in these teams. In fact, one editor suggested that we rename the book “Virtuoso Leaders,” but we thought that the team piece was central to our beliefs.
I think that it’s important to first return to the essentials of the VT concept: these are all teams specially chosen to pursue big change; and they are all teams where we would argue that more was actually gotten out of all of the talented individuals on these teams [in a non-exploitative sense] than would be true in a traditional team context. Nonetheless, Miles Davis, Roald Amundsen, Thomas Edison, Jerome Robbins, Sid Caesar, Oppenheimer, even Kjell Sunde, were all strong individuals, who were certainly right in the middle of it all [“leadership as a contact sport”], and who were essential for what happened in the team.
I think that, in each instance, the strong leader on the Virtuoso Teams served to enlarge each other individual on the team, rather than diminishing them. And that this, in turn, led to each individual giving “the performance of their lives,” as a result. Would it have happened without the strong leader? I don’t know? Maybe not. But the strong leader, in every case, exhibited the same behaviors that I think increased the probability of the team getting more, rather than less, out of its collaboration. Those behaviors included:
• They listened rather then told – remember, the team members were all virtuosos in their own right, and typically in highly technical fields. So, if you weren’t listening to them, you certainly couldn’t tell them very much, because they knew things that the leader didn’t. That’s why they were there.
• They focused on collaboration and an exchange of ideas (not idea hoarding) – when you think about it, in every case the strong leader manipulated time and space to create more effective conversational climates for faster and richer idea-sharing.
• They encouraged prototyping: I’m a big fan of prototyping to move group conversations faster and better and, again, in nearly every case, it was the leader who encouraged the team to [in the words of IDEO] “fail faster to succeed sooner.” Think: Jerry Robbins modularizing the dances for rapid response to audience reactions; Thomas Edison’s working on three different phonograph prototypes [cylinder, disc, and wire] simultaneously; Caesar’s rapid trying and accepting/rejecting of jokes, without pain; etc. In a very real sense of the term, each leader fostered a “learning culture” in each team. No team stood still!
• When things didn’t work out, they challenged the ideas not the “person” – if you’re trying to break-through the envelope in an effort to create something really new, you’re inevitably going to get some things wrong. These leaders, by the way they played their roles, turned failure into an opportunity for learning by encouraging fast, and specific, criticism of bad ideas, as well as having an extremely low tolerance for underperformance. But, they never attacked the integrity of the individual associated with such situations. It was always about how “the performance was not up to what the rest of us deserved; you can do better!”
• Create an environment where conversations occur regularly – Sunde’s cramped team room at Norsk Hydro; Caesar’s Writers’ Room; Amundsen’s simple “Winter” hut; Bill Evans’ room over the Chinese laundry; these were all perfect places for rich, fast and cross-pollinating conversations to take place. They didn’t just happen, they were designed, encouraged, endorsed. Recall Oppenheimer’s fight with Groves over compartmentalization for security and its deleterious effects on idea-flow.
• Allow individuals to remain individuals – Finally, these teams were all about going to great lengths to find gifted individuals [these team leaders spent an enormous amount of their time as “talent-scouts,” which must have left a lot of time for others to take leadership responsibility] and then resisting the urge to diminish these individuals into “team-players.” Remember, these teams were all aimed at “big change,” so, instead of following the traditional advice of Hire for attitudes, train for skills; the leaders Hired for skills and figured out how to deal with the attitudes.
Finally, one last thought, if I may. Whether you had a Virtuoso Team is not as important as how the team made use of the talent that it had, in achieving its goals. You can have a team of great people, doing great things, and not have it meet the characteristics that we saw. But, our experience is that most teams that hire great people wind-up getting only average results. That’s not the goal! Whatever it takes to get the most out of the talent assembled, in pursuit of the corporate goals, should be the mission. If big change is required, however, we’d recommend VTs.
Again, I hope that you don’t mind my joining the conversation. Thanks for considering our ideas! And, good luck!
Bill Fischer
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