WPenner's Blog

I recently re-read Warren Bennis' paper "The Secrets of Great Groups."¹ I found myself considering his words in the context of groups struggling to create knowledge products to share with others. Many of these groups are really research groups, dedicating the majority of their time to discovering knowledge worth sharing and then crafting products to present that knowledge in helpful ways to customers.

Group leadership is as crucial to research groups as keeping structure to a minimum. The difference between a well led group and a failure of leadership is displayed in the success or failure of the group enterprise itself. In a non-hierarchical group, leadership manifests with every member taking "ownership" for 4 activities: generating and sustaining trust among group members, generating hope, generating direction and meaning for the project, personally demonstrating action and risk based in curiosity;

I personally resist taking responsibility for all of these except the last two. I have a bias toward diving into my curiosity and exploring the unknown. I like taking action, even if it seems a little risky and I don't know exactly what result to expect. Because of my exploratory risk taking, I can usually see a bit further down the path than others, which makes generating project direction and meaning easier. The key to all of these are that they are well within my locus of control.

Conversely though, I suffer massive failures of confidence and imagination when it comes to generating feelings in others. What actions or words create trust or hope, let alone sustain them? The same word and action to different groups can result in radically different outcomes. A group will react to same things at different times or circumstances in wildly different ways.

So, more than knowing that these things are required of leadership for groups, I need to understand how to generate those things beyond personally modelling them.

A key "dog not barking" observation about these four activities is that they don't include many activities groups often focus on. There is nothing related to organization. Making rules or making sure everyone is pulling their weight are both suspiciously absent. Is that because these activities are not important or that they are not important to the creation of great groups? Or is it because those things are taken for granted as too basic to mention?

If the genius of great groups, with which Bennis starts this paper, is true, that great groups go far beyond achieving great results and provide psychic support, personal fellowship and generate courage for team members then time spent controlling others has no place in a great group. Lists of rules cannot provide psychic support; if they did the lists would never need to grow, and we see they always do. Nobody's sense of personal fellowship grows where suspicion of social loafing is the dominant milieu. No bureaucratic organization has ever generated courage.

Rules, organization and reducing social loafing might be useful tasks, but they're not important. An important distinction. Keeping such tasks to an absolute minimum keeps unnecessary friction from stopping great teams from becoming their best.

Groups must be human led. Structure cannot substitute for the human touch. As my study buddy, Mike noted: groups cannot be led from human's lower nature which wants to control.²