WINNING TEAMS

Winning Teams is for anyone who is interested in leadership, management and teamwork, and also for anyone who works with or has to deal with a narcissistic leader or manager. Narcissistic and codependent behaviour by leaders and managers can hold back the progress of an organization.

There has been much research by academics into winning teams, specifically entrepreneurs, leadership and senior management teams, and there has been much written about these subjects by entrepreneurs, but it is difficult to find resources that combine the two, that is, academic research into winning teams carried out by an entrepreneur. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, a renowned academic, stated:^Ref

"One of the problems has been that too many theories about organizations have had their gestation in the ivory towers of academia... often far removed from the reality of day-to-day life."

I spent over twenty years working as part of a senior management team (CEO). Under my leadership the organization enjoyed an almost constant record of growth, year-on-year for those twenty years, growing from just three employees to nearly one hundred. During this time I took advantage of the opportunity to carry out in-depth research into complete senior management teams of both 'growth' and 'lifestyle' organizations. Few academic researchers have been able to achieve access to complete senior management teams, particularly in 'growth' organizations.

The dearth of empirical studies into winning teams is due to the huge difficulty in gaining access to all members of a senior management team. Here are some quotes from academics who have recognized the problem:

"One reason is the lack of access to such top management teams. It is almost impossible to obtain the commitment of the whole (or even most) of the team to participate in a study."^Ref

"… managers tend to be powerful and busy people. … feasible research questions may be determined more by access possibilities than by theoretical considerations."^Ref

"Finding and gaining access to [senior management] teams in rapid growth firms is not an easy task."^Ref

Havaleschka^Ref carried out research into winning teams and asked the question, "Does the top-level management team make the difference between a company's success and failure?" Following empirical investigation he asserted that his conclusion was definitive, stating, "…in the end, the success and failure of a company depends on the personality of the leader and the composition of the personalities in the group of top leaders."

Despite the lack of research into winning teams, it is still critical that you know the personality characteristics of your senior management team members. Ruth Wageman used a multi-method field study to examine the effects of two kinds of leader behaviour on the effectiveness of self-managing teams. The two kinds of leader behaviour related to team design and team coaching. The study revealed that the quality of coaching had no effect on team task performance. The design of the team was paramount when measuring performance.^Ref

But if you have a team member that doesn't fit, preventing the team from becoming a winning team, don't make the mistake of thinking that you can change him or her by, for example, coaching. Research has shown that personality characteristics remain relatively stable in adulthood. The five broad domains of personality known as the Big Five; extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect or openness, were found to have a high level of stability over time. The median correlation for measures of the Big Five across time points of three to thirty years apart was high (r = 0.65).^Ref

So if you want a winning team, it is essential that you identify senior management team members, including the leader, with the right personality characteristics. But with the scarcity of appropriate research in this field, there is very little information available in the public domain to enable you to achieve this. This is where Winning Teams may help to fill the gap by helping you understand yourself, your leader or your managers. Winning Teams may also help you identify narcissistic behavior and help you to deal with it.

Note: ^Ref in the text means 'Reference'. Move the mouse over ^Ref to read the source of the academic reference.