What If We’ve Been Looking at Leadership from the Wrong Direction?

At Common Ground, we understand the importance of a good leader with skills that can motivate a team to do their best. However, we believe that what is often overlooked is not just what the leader does for the team, but what the people in the team do for each other.

This was the idea that caught my attention recently when listening to Keith Ferrazzi discuss what he calls “teamship”, which is the idea that there is an underdeveloped layer in our thinking about leadership: how teams themselves give feedback, hold one another accountable and maintain the energy and effectiveness of the group.

His argument is compelling because so much of our workplace thinking still positions the leader as the person responsible for making the team work. But in between the leaders and the people, is the team; and this is what is often overlooked.

So I would love to ask businesses to consider the question: What are you doing to create a layer of team life that doesn’t belong exclusively to the leader, but everyone?

This layer looks like:

• colleagues giving useful feedback to each other (not just the leader).

• people around you helping you stay accountable (not just the leader).

• peers contributing equally to a positive team environment (not just the leader).

When a team is formed, people interact as a collection of individuals who work together and they bring patterns, relationships, unspoken expectations, behaviours that get reinforced, people who challenge, people who stay quiet. Over time, this naturally becomes the normal way of operating. Is the leader responsible for that? Yes, but I believe strengths work makes this more interesting.

Strengths work is often introduced as a way for individuals to understand themselves better.

This is always a really valuable proposition, but at Common Ground, we have taken it much further.

• We start with: “What are my strengths?”

• We move on to: “What do my strengths mean for the people I work with?”

• And delve deeper into: “What do our collective strengths mean for how we work together?”

This then gets the team to have a very different conversation. Because once a team understands its strengths, it can begin to mature into a culture of "teamship" and ask questions like:

• Who naturally sees possibilities?

• Who naturally spots risks?

• Who brings people together?

• Who pushes for action?

• Who thinks strategically?

• Who notices patterns?

• Who brings energy?

• Who asks the question everyone else has avoided?

And in all of the workshops I have run at Common Ground, the golden egg at the end of the session is always: What happens when we don’t have enough of one of these perspectives in the room? That is where strengths stop being a conversations around the personalities in the group and start becoming a team conversation.

If you're interested in considering changing your question from “What should our leader do to make this a better team?” to: “What can each person in the team do to make a better team?”, then we would absolutely love to talk with you.

A Common Ground workshop won't reduce the importance of leadership, but can make leadership more sustainable. It can make the team responsible for bringing out the best in each other and develop a positive culture around people respectfully helping each other succeed.

That is the idea of teamship that I find so interesting. Because leadership matters, but the leader is only one person, the team is everyone. So get a team that leads itself by having a chat with us today.

Author: Rachael.