Will your team thrive in 2013?

Over the holiday period, I was thinking again about effective teams and leadership, since they are so critical to whether your firm thrives or not.

The University of British Columbia recently carried out research into whether dominant, bullying styles or prestige, skill and respect-based styles provide the best paths to influence. We know that people often defer to those who seek to intimidate them (because, for example, they may be able to negatively influence your career).

For tasks that involve making decisions quickly, the research suggests that it is better to have a dominant leader, while prestigious style groups do better in tasks that involve more creativity and input from subordinate group members. As it admits, this makes intuitive sense: we all know that different styles of leadership may be more effective at different stages.

The university also noted that dominant types tend to be less liked. It is interesting that it has separately undertaken research into bullying amongst children, which found that children who perform small acts of kindness tend to boost their own happiness levels.

The basic concept underlying professional service firms is that people should be in partnership with each other. This suggests that collegiality, trust, respect, commitment and accountability are essential. Having strong personalities should not have to equate with seeking to bully others.

People are sometimes confused over when a board needs to work as a group to make decisions and when it should be a team and work together jointly on tasks. But, in all cases, there is no doubt that how well people work together is critical to your future and how people treat each other is fundamental to the culture your firm builds.

It has been a decade since Patrick Lencioni wrote his fable The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and, while I have a degree of scepticism about magic numbers in management frameworks, the models can nevertheless be very useful.

In summary, Lenconi states that the first dysfunction in teams is an absence of trust. As a result, people conceal mistakes, are hesitant to ask for help or to provide constructive feedback, and may jump to conclusions about the intentions of others.

Second, teams fear conflict, so they avoid discussing critical topics, causing underground politics to thrive.

Third, lack of commitment means discussions are repeatedly revisited, which is often a sign that people do not believe all ideas have been seriously considered in reaching a decision.

Fourth, people avoid accountability – they avoid difficult discussions and suspect that ‘failures’ may be held against them in reviews.

Finally, teams may not focus on results. We know that concentrating on individual results rather than collective goals is a major cause of team failure. All too often, you can see examples of these dysfunctional behaviours in law firms.

The New Year is a time for renewal and reinvigoration, so perhaps it is also a good time to reflect on which behaviours will serve your firm best in the year ahead.

Intel’s former leader, Andrew Grove, was said to have had board strategy retreats where the board imagined they were ‘fired’ so that they were free to step back and consider how the firm looked from the outside and what they would change.

What culture do you want to promulgate and might you need to tackle this year?