Business Leaders: Success through effective management and teamwork

Nobody needs to instruct sportsmen, in non-individual sports, to form teams: no team, no game. Even in individual games like tennis, golf and athletics, teams form: not only doubles partnerships, foursomes and relay teams, but whole groups of golfers, tennis players or athletes, competing under the same banner for prestigious international trophies. Cricket, highly individualistic, is also played in teams - but nobody doubts that the sum of a good team, in any sport, is greater than its parts.

The same is true of business. Top managers always, but often falsely, speak proudly of their teams. But in most companies, the leader is never a non-playing captain - like Tony Jacklin, under whose leadership Europe first took the Walker Cup from the US. The business captain, the chief executive, not only plays, but plays from a position of unique strength. In Germany, he is more likely to be primus inter pares, first among equals, which roughly describes the England captain in rugby or cricket. But in business the British chief executive is far more equal than the others.

This runs counter to proven fact. Team-based organisation is far more successful than the one-man band. The most basic of the principles that have to be followed for teams to reach their enormous potential is that leaders must be genuine team-leaders - and the necessary behaviour doesn't come naturally. As an American consultant, Erika Anderson of Proteus International, notes, 'at first it's hard to persuade them to let go of control.

'But once they become actively self-reflective, they realise they don't know all the answers. That sort of humbleness is very charismatic, because it makes the others on the team feel useful and powerful.'

Her emphasis on 'self-reflection', or introspection, may seem odd in the context of leadership. But self-mastery is the key to mastery in any sport or any management activity. Paradoxically, time spent on developing individual skills and attitudes pays off in working more effectively with others. One vital skill, as Anderson implies, is thinking about yourself - yet managers complain that they lack enough time to think about the business, let alone their psyches.

This can't be true. Pressures of day-to-day work are never so massive that every last second is preempted by operations. Any expert on time management can uncover great chasms of misspent time. Peter Drucker's neat catechism never fails. What am I doing that needn't be done by anybody? That could be done by somebody else? That can only be done by me? Honest answers will provide a surprisingly short third category. But this refers to activities within the manager's control. When working in teams, much activity is dictated by other members.

Help is nigh. Networked personal computers should not only discipline managers through diary programs, but should also speed teamwork by file-sharing, information retrieval and minimising meetings. Rank Xerox holds out hopes of dramatic change in the executive day from the present routine, which divides time in equal fifths between gathering information, communicating, organising, meetings and thinking. Instead, thanks to networking, the breakdown could be 10% each for the first four - leaving six times as many hours for independent thought or team-thinking.

Thinking time must be used, for reasons both corporate and personal. Research reported in Fortune suggests that lack of introspection raises executive stress and lessens managerial effectiveness. You need time to reflect and introspect in order to acquire vital abilities: objectivity, learning, self-confidence, responsibility, tolerance for ambiguity and paradox, balance in life, creativity and intuition, and subjugation of ego.

Those attributes, all plainly good and essential to effective teamworking, sound imprecise. Can the process of team-thinking leadership be tightened up? For a start, you must abandon the adversarial thinking which Edward de Bono attacked in I Am Right, You Are Wrong. One of his great escape routes is the Six Hats method: six-hatted people follow different modes of thinking, which are symbolised by different colours.

When a group dons White hats, everybody concentrates on what information is available, what's needed, how it can be obtained. Switching to Green, everybody concentrates on developing new ideas, new possibilities. Wearing Black hats, the same people apply caution and risk assessment to their brilliant Green ideas. Under the Yellow Hat, they look for benefits in a 'logical positive' manner. Blue-hatted, they study the whole thinking process - what are they thinking about and how?

Eureka! thoughts are red-hatted; the team relies on intuition and emotions, with no requirement to justify the idea. Using the hats, the team brings all its intellectual horsepower to bear positively, instead of wasting time because one side is arguing with the other. As one chief executive ruefully admitted to de Bono, 'I used to wait until somebody said something with which I disagreed, and then jump on him.' With Six Hats, that's out - thinking consequently becomes much quicker, and teamwork more real.

Six Hats has the added virtue of excluding one purpose altogether: victory over another team-member. If the Green Hat has been ordained, say, you have to join in creative thinking. That takes politics out of the equation; you can no longer attack people by attacking their ideas. The Japanese, the world's most successful exponents of teamwork, start here with an advantage: their intellectual tradition isn't adversarial. That's in marked contrast to the West, where the more powerful you are, the more you like to 'win' an argument.

In a good team, everybody wins. Differing views come forward, and good leaders, having listened to their exposition, sum up the consensus. De Bono's book, Parallel Thinking, shows how team-thinkers can create parallel possibilities, different and possibly contradictory hypotheses, from which they create a new design. Traditional analytical thinking says move from A to B as soon as possible; the parallel model is more akin to Japanese modes, where people don't know what they're thinking until they've heard and considered all the possibilities.

Ben Heirs, author of The Professional Decision Thinker, is convinced that much public and private error would be avoided if teams properly executed their prime function: thinking. Even the greatest individual intelligence has limits: the ceilings of combined brainpower are much higher. As he says, if the team is effectively led, and its thinking processes properly structured, 'Alternatives and their possible consequences can then be created and explored more fully and intelligently, without the debate becoming divisive, unfocused and unprofessional.'

Does that fit your last meeting - or many that you have ever attended? If not, 'considerable damage and waste' probably resulted. Heirs stresses that leadership of the team is crucial - but that the skills involved are those most often neglected when picking leaders: or letting them stay in office. Lacking the ability (for which read training) to harvest other minds, the leader gravitates towards one-man-bandmanship: or one-womanship.

One well-known female boss, for example, takes every single product decision. She's nearly always right. But in the process of being right, she destroys the ability of others to go beyond their present horizons. When Lee Iacocca abdicated the Detroit boss's godlike right of final yea and nay on new models, Chrysler took a giant step towards becoming America's most profitable car company. There was once a panel show entitled 'Does the Team Think?'. If it isn't a team, and doesn't think, you can't be surprised if disaster follows.

Today, moreover, it's a team or nothing. A UK boss for a globe-girdling multinational who had some news for his top team. Henceforward, careers wouldn't progress from post to post, each more senior and better-paid than the one before. Instead, roles and success would relate to skills - what the team members could do, rather than where they did it. That's the logical inference from the changing pattern of managerial work. As more and more time goes into multi-disciplinary project teams, task forces and the like, functional roles and hierachical titles mean less and less.

That's nothing new in companies: technologists have always worked that way. The best available scientist or engineer leads the R&D project - and then moves on to the next. Today management must increasingly operate in similar style, simply because it saves time, money and mistakes to have all disciplines involved from start to finish. Yet the great majority of managers still operate in their functional and hierarchical cocoons.

Many companies rightly bring executives together for combined sessions to seek better strategies and leadership - and it's immediately clear that internal barriers impede realisation of generally shared and sensible aims. In that multinational example cited above, for example, there was one flaw. The executive team had never heard its leader's ideas before. As it happened, they agreed with the new strategic line. They should, of course, have been involved from the beginning. True teams are led from the front: but only in the sense that an orchestra is 'led'.