Chapter by Isabel Freire de Andrade from the book "85 Voices for Leadership" published by ISCTE in November 2024.
A case that illustrates how to make this transformation
Why do we need teams instead of individual leaders?
The world has some very big challenges and the generations to come will have even bigger challenges. These problems are impossible to solve by hero leaders, that is, ultra-competent people with excellent leadership skills. The world urgently needs teams that not only function as more than the sum of their parts, but also collaborate and act as partners with all their stakeholders to co-create exceptional value for them and have a ripple effect. The era of the hero leader has passed and gone!
Current challenges such as climate change, widening inequality, migration, rising mental stress and rising human prejudice are interconnected. You cannot solve one of these problems without addressing the other. All these challenges are symptoms of the fact that human consciousness has not changed with the world that man has created. For example, in 70 years the world population went from 2.5 billion people to 8 billion, people increased their use of technology exponentially, the pace of events increased, and with the pandemic, anxiety skyrocketed, and many people went through to do telework.
In this context, the hero leader cannot succeed. An efficient team is much faster, can handle much more complexity, is more creative and can have more skills and learning than a single person. And you will need all of this to deal with the current context and solve the big problems. What is now needed are leadership teams that can combine each other’s strengths.
What we need now are leadership teams at all levels of organizations and across all sectors. Leadership teams that are more than the sum of their parts and that collaborate with all stakeholders. We have to move from individual intelligence to collective intelligence. Only then can teams take a step forward and solve challenges and create value for generations to come.
An example of an intervention where they moved from a hero leader mindset to a leadership team mindset?
I will briefly illustrate how to achieve this transformation from a hero leader to a leading team through an intervention I did with systemic team coaching, according to the teachings I received from Peter Hawkins.
The Change Process for Leadership Teams involves working on 5 aspects:
- Focus teams on purpose
- Create common goals
- Working on relationships within the team
- Building partnerships with stakeholders
- Constantly develop the team and its members
In this case, an administrator from a large company in the Services area, who I will call João, asked me to intervene in his team. He urgently needed to make a major change throughout the organization and he knew that this would only happen if all of his Directors pulled in the same direction.
Directors were used to leading their teams without having to worry about other teams and had always been led by directive and charismatic Administrators. With the change to this leader, John, they were, to say the least, confused. John wanted them to be accountable for meeting global goals and not just their department's goals. He held weekly meetings where they had to help solve everyone's problems, and he wanted them to stop competing with each other.
João asked me to help the team on their journey to increase accountability and cooperation, and I proposed expanding the program to help the team clarify its purpose and objectives and improve partnerships with various stakeholders.
We started by making a diagnosis with meetings and questionnaires where we analyzed the 5 areas in which this team would have to make a leap. Then we worked on the different areas in the different team coaching sessions, individual coaching sessions that took place over 6 months. The process was quite fun, as this administrator always asked to introduce some outdoor activity into the events. But at the same time he was very serious and efficient.
Below, I describe how we work on each of the 5 areas that allow us to achieve Leadership Teams.
1 - When we were working on the Purpose, that is, why the team exists for the various stakeholders, the team wrote down what each of the stakeholders wanted from them - the board, the investors, the customers and the community in which they operate. They also reflected on stakeholders they might be forgetting. The most interesting thing was discovering the “13th fairy”, that is, the stakeholder they weren’t inviting to the party and who would compromise the future if they continued to pay attention. The Stakeholder that would be decisive for
2 - They were then prepared to move on to clarifying the Common Objectives, that is, WHAT they were going to be able to do. Through this work, they were creating their own sense of collective effort – what were they there to achieve that they couldn’t accomplish working in parallel? What were the team's KPIs? Not just individual KPIs, but also collective goals and functions. How did they not only perform their duties but also contribute to the whole? This mindset shift requires that these goals are constantly being visited and measured, so in every weekly meeting they created a routine of sharing what they had contributed to the team's goals the previous week and what they were going to contribute the following week. We train ways to do this within the team and for their respective teams, in online and in-person formats.
3 - In all team coaching sessions and meetings we worked on Team Co-creation, that is, HOW the team worked together and its ability to create. This topic was very challenging. They had to experiment with different ways of working together until they could be creative. The challenge was to figure out the answer to “How can we have meetings where we’re not just exchanging pre-prepared thoughts, but generating new thoughts that none of us had before we walked into the room?” Here they practiced new ways of giving and receiving feedback, made agreements to ensure psychological safety and conflict management. They also worked on positive thinking to ensure stress management and focus on opportunities rather than problems. Outdoor activities helped create good memories and bond. With these interventions, competition between Directors and between their departments lost its meaning, conflicts healed, people became more relaxed and positive, greatly improving their mental health. We already had a team that was far greater than the sum of its parts and that resolved unexpected and complex issues with ease. Each member of this team also prepared to co-create with their teams. As they worked in a hybrid format, they had to train empathy and initiative skills and participative and relational leadership styles and began to:
- asking and observing how employees were feeling and what their needs were
- ask employees for suggestions on how they could improve relationships and motivation
- have ideas to create a good relationship between everyone on the team when they were online, such as organizing online happy hours, doing games and quizzes through online platforms and doing exercises in subgroups using breakout rooms.
4 - Shortly after, a new challenge arose, and this time it was with a Stakeholder. The new European ESG rules were not being complied with. Connecting with stakeholders, that is, customers, suppliers, investors, communities and the environment, was then the theme we began to work on. The challenge they had at that time was with the stakeholder environment. In team meetings we would place an empty chair that represented the stakeholder environment and then ask each member to sit in that chair, watch the meeting and say what they thought of the decisions made. Each member also trained to be able to represent the entire team, not just their role, when engaging externally. No one defended just their “farm” anymore.
5 - Throughout all the meetings, we also worked on how the entire team could develop and learn, and not just the individuals within it. In every meeting and event we held, the team reflected on how they could increase their collective capacity and how the team could become a source of individual expansion and development for each of them.
Now, they were ready to be a true Leadership Team. As we measured their efficiency and satisfaction, the results increased significantly. They were already aligned, motivated, holding good meetings and interacting positively within the team and with the various stakeholders. The change in the organization was already being implemented and, despite setbacks, was progressing rapidly.
This team managed to become a team that was much greater than the sum of its parts and that resolved unexpected and complex issues with ease. Furthermore, the leader was no longer the hero, everyone now saw them as a Leadership Team.
These Leadership Teams are possible to create and are the solution to solving the world's greatest challenges. The process of transforming these teams is demanding, but it can be very interesting and an excellent growth experience.
Isabel Freire de Andrade - CEO Bright Concept and Coach
Participation in the book "Voices for Leadership". Translated to english.