Over the years I’ve seen my share of student project teams perform well, and my share of those that don’t perform well (even a few that have totally imploded to the point of physical and/or emotional violence). If I had to sum up what led to the good, the bad and the ugly outcomes in one word, it would be this: Leadership.
If you type “definition of leadership” into Google, in less than a second, it will tell you there are approximately 2,480,000,000 hits. Perhaps it’s easier to ask what leaders do –
- Have a vision for what the team is all about accomplishing (and they understand how this fits in with the needs of whoever’s project the team is working on).
- They communicate that vision to team members, and they remain open to feedback on how things are going and how things might need to change – they understand that feedback is their friend rather than their foe.
- They motivate, guide and support team members to be the best versions of themselves they can be, and that means stretching what people are capable of without stretching them beyond what they are actually capable of. They are the ultimate influencers.
- They understand that they work for the team, not the other way around.
- They celebrate goal achievements, both for the team and for members within the team – they are the Cheerleader-in-Chief.
- They never confuse being friendly with team members with trying to be their friends, because leadership decisions may sometimes conflict with “friend” decisions.
Being able to do all these things doesn’t make them superhuman, but it does make them super humans. The teams that do well have leaders that do all of these things well; and may really excel at some of them. The teams that don’t do well have leaders who may not be particularly good at some of these things; and may deliberately try to avoid having to do some of them. You can see why it’s important to have the right person in the role because they set the tone for what is collaboratively possible.
In all my years facilitating Project-Based Learning, where teams have had total control over choosing their own leaders, I’ve only ever seen two teams of three who were able to work successfully without one designated person in a formal team leadership role. These were the “freaks of nature”, as I told them when they openly refused to put somebody in that role. Because they’d worked together on other courses, they already knew who they wanted to work with, and how each other worked. They were like the stereotypical “old married couples” – they could finish each other’s sentences (correctly) because they knew how each other thought. They also knew that they would always have each other’s backs, no matter what the situation. Distributed leadership simply worked for them, and I’m glad I let them have their way about that.
Most other teams have tried to get a person into the formal leadership role quickly – it’s one more thing they can cross of the list so they can get to work on sorting out the project as soon as possible. That haste, though, has often been their undoing, because it means they haven’t asked the right questions in their teams or paid enough attention to the answers they are getting. So often it’s the person who speaks up first who ends up in the role because everybody else has this impression they must know what they are doing. Other times, it’s the person who makes the most noise who gets the role, pretty much for the same flawed reason.
I could have made the decisions for the teams and appointed members to roles. That would have taken the decision-making onus off them which, in my view, would have been counter-productive because it would have robbed them of the opportunity to learn about making HR decisions in practice (and dealing with the results of those decisions). As a project facilitator, I’m there to support teams making and living with the results of their decisions.
Only twice have I acted to remove (temporarily) individuals from formal leadership roles in student teams. On both occasions – where I had been invited in by the teams – it was clearly untenable on health and safety grounds to leave them in those roles until certain performance issues were resolved. I made it clear it was not my intention to fill the direct leadership role in their teams on a permanent basis, and that leadership would devolve back to the teams as soon as it was practical and safe to do so.
The connection with what I said in my previous blog about ATTITUDE is this:
Leadership is about the team – not the individual ego
I’m interested in learning about your thinking on this topic, because it’s through collaborative conversations that we can create even more valuable learning and development experiences. Let me know what you think.
In my next blog on Thursday 12 January, I will share my thinking about self-leadership and how that’s compatible with collaborative project team membership.
Rob
Rob Nelson Education 