Navigate the Swirl

CHAPTER 10High-Performing Teams: Stage 3, Distributed Leadership, continued

The strength of the team is each individual member.

The strength of each member is the team.

―Phil Jackson

As we've journeyed through the stages of enterprise evolution, you may have noticed one term appearing more and more frequently on these pages—namely, teams. At stage 1, the independent contributors who come together to form a business are barely a team—they're more of a loose confederation. At stage 2, you might see teams beginning to form around different functions or projects, but they're less important than the hierarchical reporting relationships that connect the business functions to the directive leader. At stage 3, however, teams become critical. The matrix structure of a stage 3 organization is not just a matrix of individuals; it's a matrix of teams—specifically, intact teams with clear leadership. So our discussion of stage 3 would not be complete without taking a closer look at teams—what they are, how they work, and how they can become high performing.

This last point—the creation of high-performing teams—is really the focus of this chapter and of the rest of the book. It's one thing to organize your structure around teams; it's quite another to have those teams be high performing. In a thriving stage 3 organization (and in stage 4, as we'll discuss in the next chapter) high-performing teams become the engine of growth, transformation, value creation, and innovation. The Seven Crucial ...