The New Why Teams Don't Work

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chapter 23 Myths of Team Leadership

Leadership is the vessel for many of the worst team myths, for a logical reason. As keepers of the team vision, leaders make up a lot of stuff. Here are some of the worst illusions foisted on us by leaders about leadership.

• Teams require a single individual to lead them. It isn’t so. There are many models of team leadership, ranging from traditional iron-hand rule through various degrees of self-direction to apparent leaderlessness. Leadership can rotate by the clock, or by the task at hand.
• Strong leadership ensures success. Again, it isn’t so. Strong leadership is useless if the people following the leader are incompetent or uninterested in the team task. A fundamentally bad team cannot be “led”—except ...