Diverse Leadership roles in Effective Virtual Teams

A very interesting paper on the "Importance of Diversified Leadership Roles in Improving Team Effectiveness in a Virtual Collaboration Learning Environment".

By Chen, C. C., Wu, J., Yang, S. C., & Tsou, H.-Y. from the Journal of Educational Technology & Society (2008)

The authors used Quinn’s (1984) Model of Leadership Roles which has eight leadership different roles along two dimensions (Innovator, Broker, Producer, Director, Coordinator, Monitor, Facilitator, Mentor).

"The Abstract

Virtual teams enabled by information and communications technologies (ICT) are increasingly being adopted not only by for-profit organizations but also by education institutions as well. This study investigates what contributes to the success of virtual learning teams. Specifically, we examine the issue of leadership in virtual learning teams.

The study first reviews the current literature on teams, leadership, and trust then proposes a framework of team effectiveness of virtual learning teams. A field study is conducted to investigate the influence of several independent variables including diversified leadership roles, leadership effectiveness, team trust, and propensity to trust.

It is found that diversified leadership roles influences both leadership effectiveness and team trust; both leadership effectiveness and propensity to trust influence team trust, and team trust in turn directly impacts team effectiveness.

In addition, team trust mediates the relationship between leadership effectiveness and team effectiveness. Some practical implications of the results are discussed as well."

Put this another way, in my opinion the paper provides solid evidence that a distributed approach to Leadership is a powerful way to build team effectiveness and results.

Leaders must play different roles to get the best out of their teams, yet we all have particular strengths and weaknesses - and indeed preferences for personal style and behaviour. By distributing Leadership roles and responsibilities across different people, depending on the need, a more effective team result ensues.

See the full paper at www.ifets.info/index.php?http://www.ifets.info/abstract.php?art_id=832

Leadership while in the line of fire

From the Financial Times, by Stefan Stern

When the markets turn nasty, a pseudo-military cry of “tin hats on!” goes up. But this is just a joke. Livelihoods may be at stake in business but not, usually, life itself.

The young men and women training to become British army officers at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS) in Surrey, south-west of London, do not take matters of life and death so lightly. They are learning what it means to lead people in perilous situations. They may be only weeks away, some of them, from a posting to Helmand province in Afghanistan. This concentrates the mind.

The military and commercial worlds are different, and do not on the face of it have a lot in common. But perhaps it would be useful for business people to hear a bit more about the Sandhurst view on leadership, these being serious times, even if the lazy metaphors of the business world – “cut-throat competition” or “nuking the enemy”– should still be avoided.

In an understated way, Sandhurst can offer some radical and surprisingly progressive thoughts on leadership. “The reason we focus so much on leadership is because we have no choice,” says Major General David Rutherford-Jones, commandant at RMAS. The stakes are high. “The fundamental difference between what my brother-in-law, who works at Schroders, does and what we do is that ultimately an army’s purpose is to fight, if that is what the nation requires of it.

“We are by implication putting people’s lives at risk. They are in harm’s way. We ask people potentially to put their life on the line for a greater cause, and this is fundamentally against [the] human psyche. And that’s the bottom line for our business.”

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New Commandments for Leaders

From Jim Murray's new blog ... Jim is an longstanding net-acquaintance, and his words always contain much truth and helpful advice.

"If I were to suggest ten commandments to guide today’s chief executives in the task of building innovative, resilient, high-performance teams, my initial list would probably look something like this.

THOU SHALT:

1. Have a vision for change and "connect" it to your employees’ reality
Don’t expect your organization to change if employees do not know where you want to go. Don’t assume that they know what the intended change means for their day-to-day job. Explain exactly how their role and performance is crucial in fulfilling your vision.

2. Remove the barriers that impede or retard progress towards the goal
Things always stand in the way of change. As the chief executive, you have the power and ability to remove or alter those things. Your employees may not. It can be as simple as giving explicit permission to do things differently or being more tolerant of the inevitable "productivity dip" as people develop new competencies.

3. Remember that the primary objective is progress not perfection
Change requires courage and patience. Rome was not built in a day. Reward success and see failure as part of the learning process. Give constructive feedback by pointing the way, not the finger. Nurture intellectual capital, don’t intimidate and alienate it.

4. Ensure your senior managers emulate the desired change
Actions always speak louder than words. The objective is not to tell but to show, dramatically and empathically, how the new way of doing things will start at the top. Senior management buy-in must be unequivocal, whole-hearted and openly demonstrated. Words become meaningless when behaviours tell a different story.

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CEO Turnover Grows

From Inc.com, by Alexandra Zendrian ...

"The turnover rate of chief executives at the world's wealthiest companies jumped 10 percent in 2007, according to a study by New York-based public relations firm Weber Shandwick.

Last year, 81 CEOs at the world's top 500 companies by income left their jobs, including 27 at North American-based businesses alone, the study found. At 16.2 percent, the rate of CEO outplacement is approaching a 16.4 percent global high set three years ago.

Over half of North American CEOs left their jobs at the end of last year. The sharpest level of turnover was in the telecommunications and financial sectors.

"Although many CEOs leave for ordinary reasons such as retirement and succession planning, an increasing number also leave involuntarily," Leslie Gaines-Ross, a Weber Shandwick spokesperson, said in a statement.

"Just as CEOs receive most of the credit when things go right, they are expected to accept the majority of the blame when things go wrong."

Leadership and Innovation

From the McKinsey Quarterly, by Joanna Barsh, Marla M. Capozzi, and Jonathan Davidson.

"Innovation has become a primary force driving the growth, performance, and valuation of companies. Our research reveals a wide gap between the aspirations of executives to innovate and their ability to execute.

Many companies make the mistake of trying to spur innovation by turning to unreliable best practices and to organizational structures and processes. Our research shows that executives who focus on stimulating and supporting innovation by their employees can promote and sustain it with the current talent and resources—and more effectively than they could by using other incentives.

Three approaches can help executives mount innovation efforts. First, senior management should actively support behavior that promotes innovation. Second, network analysis can identify where the capacity for innovation already exists within an organization and help it build more innovative networks. Finally, executives should seed innovative thinking by focusing on selected managers and projects."

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Has the time come for C.E.O. Version 3.0?

From New York Times Business, by Stuart Isett

The first iteration made its mark in the 1990s, as chief executives like Sanford I. Weill, Gerald M. Levin, John F. Welch Jr. and Michael Eisner built empires, not to mention their profiles, at the companies they ran: Citigroup, Time Warner, GE and Disney.

When the shares deflated earlier this decade after the burst of the tech bubble and various corporate scandals, a new cadre moved in: the Fix-it Men. They were lower-key leaders like Charles O. Prince III of Citigroup and Richard D. Parsons of Time Warner, whose job it was to repair the excesses and mistakes of their predecessors.

Now, management experts and longtime watchers of corporate America say the current environment demands, and is attracting, yet another kind of chief executive: the team builder.

“It’s someone who can assemble a team that functions as smoothly as a jazz sextet,” said Warren Bennis, a professor of management at the University of Southern California and author of many books on leadership.

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Teaching the Moral Leader

From HBS Working Knowledge, by Sarah Jane Gilbert

What do Sir Thomas More, Chinua Achebe, and Sophocles have to offer today's business leaders? For MBA students in HBS professor Sandra Sucher's course, The Moral Leader, great literature helps them find their own definition of moral leadership.

Sucher is one of a number of HBS faculty who have taught the course. First introduced to HBS in the late 1980s by Harvard psychiatrist and educator Robert Coles, The Moral Leader uses literature to study moral decision-making and leadership. Individual faculty teach the course using their own unique curriculum.

Sucher recently published 2 books about the course: One is a textbook, The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools, and Insights, that provides historical and social context for the works read in the course, as well as instructional materials.

The other is an instructor's guide, Teaching The Moral Leader: A Literature-Based Leadership Course, that includes practical details on how to facilitate the course, templates for grading class participation and the course paper, and conceptual overviews of topics such as how "morality" is defined in the course. "My goal is for instructors in a university or college, as well as those teaching leadership development programs (and even members of a leadership team inside a business), to feel confident in their ability to teach any of the class sessions, modules, or the entire course," Sucher explains.

Read the rest of the interview ...

Making the Tough Call

From Inc.Com, by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis

"Great leaders are celebrated for their judgment. But what is good judgment and how do the best leaders sustain it? It's not a matter of intellect or of the ability to make the right decision in an instant, but of character. Character provides the moral compass--it tells you what you must do. Then there's courage. It produces results, ensuring that you follow through on the decision you've made. No matter what processes you follow, no matter how hard you try, without character and courage, no one can clear the high bar that is judgment. You may luck into making some good decisions and sometimes obtain good results, but without character and courage, you will falter on the most difficult and most important questions.

Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase (NYSE:SCS), the office furniture company, has spent much of his career thinking about what it means to be a leader who operates based on a clear set of values. He began to develop this way of thinking, he says, after a meeting with the hotelier Bill Marriott. The men met at a pivotal moment in Hackett's business career. He was 39 and had become president of Steelcase only six months earlier. Marriott, meanwhile, was then in his seventies and had been running the Marriott (NYSE:MAR) hotel empire for decades. Despite the gap in their ages, the two men had some things in common and they hit it off. "I was young, trying to change an old family business and he was old, trying to change an old family business," Hackett recalls."

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How Styles Affect Promotion Potential

From Gary Salton's Organizational Research Blog

"I Opt" research has revealed a statistically significant connection between "I Opt" strategic styles and organizational rank (e.g., manager, VP, CEO). The research is also able to reveal why this condition exists. The connection between style and rank is not a mere association. It is causal in the sense that X causes Y.

The only way the relationships will change is if information flows change.The implications for Leadership Development are clear. The current stress on skill sets and techniques is necessary but not sufficient. Prospective leaders must master a sequence of processing patterns suitable to the level to which they aspire. What works at one level will be suboptimal for another. There is no "one" leadership strategy suited to all levels.

................

The findings reported in this blog expose a gap in current leadership development programs. A focus on techniques, methods and practices is valuable but insufficient. Candidates for leadership must be taught how to adjust their information processing profile to match the level that they are targeting."

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Virtual Leadership in Second Life

Second Life Challenges Real World Bureaucracy - from Wired by sonia zjawinski.

"We all know how long it can take a governmental body to complete a project -- Operation Iraqi Freedom anyone? Frustrated with the lack of movement and community involvement with a plan to build a new garden in the central Halles area of Paris, local residents started a competition within Second Life to come up with possible designs for the real world location.

While the association knows that the winning design (whose creator won 275,000 Linden dollars) won't be implemented because it doesn't consider real world conditions, they're hoping the competition will put pressure on the mayor to move this project along. It's been in talks since 2004.

The main prize went to Joshua Culdesac and Piper Pitney, who's idea included ambitious water features and an ice rink. Smaller prizes were also awarded, including 40,000 Linden dollars to a six-year-old in the children's play area category.

According to an article in BBC News: "Some of the participants in the competition spent up to a month working part-time on their entry, says Accomplir vice-president Gilles Pourbaix."

Photo above from the BBC

In Summary .... Tom Peters

From Tom Peters Blog ...

"I've been working on various forms of my Master Presentation, pretty much fulltime, for the last couple of weeks. A post yesterday started a rather vigorous discussion about success "rules" that withstand the test of time. Virtually nothing—you, me, the corporation, the nation—withstands the test of time. And one of the principal reasons is hardening of the philosophical arteries—increasingly rigid interpretations of yesterday's "success" rules.

So I outright reject success "rules" or "eternal" principles. Nonetheless (whoops, here it comes), you gotta do something. What follows is as far as I will go. My first list has three items:

• Cause (worthy of commitment)
• Space (room for/encouragement for initiative-adventures)
• Decency (respect, grace, integrity, humanity)

That is, find something useful that turns folks on, give them a lot of room to try their own interpretations thereof—and offer them the respect they deserve for participating in the game with commitment and determination.

I actually like my second list better, consisting of some four items:

• Hire Great People (Resilient, Passionate)
• Try a Lot of Stuff (S.A.V.-Screw Around Vigorously/R.F.A.—Ready. Fire. Aim.)
• All "Wow" All the Time (Shoot for the moon—in every circumstance)
• Enjoy It While It Lasts (And it ain't gonna last forever, so you might as well keep swinging)"

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Apples are Square

I don't often recommend books, but there is a new one out which you might find interesting - "Apples are Square", by Dr. Susan Smith Kuczmarski and Thomas Kuczmarski.

From their website:

"For centuries, leaders have been operating within a “control and compete” mindset. But the times are changing. More and more, at the helm of successful companies, you’ll find a different sort of leader. Collaborators, not controllers, they are “square apples,” bold men and women who dare to create success by reshaping the workplace in unexpected ways. In Apples Are Square, innovation consultants and celebrated authors Dr. Susan Smith Kuczmarski and Thomas Kuczmarski share with you the secrets of how to become a square apple in your organization.

To develop their groundbreaking strategy for success, the authors interviewed 25 leadership pioneers from many different work settings - media, the arts, government, sports, education, and business, including Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist; Mary Ellen Weber, former NASA astronaut; and NFL star Chris Zorich, whose personal story inspired the title of this book. With the tools in Apples Are Square, you’ll be able to take any bruised environment and reshape it into a positive force."

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