What does it mean for a leadership team to do collective work?

I often use sports teams to explain why not all teams need to work together in the same way.

Think about the difference between a rugby team, a relay team and a gymnastics team.

In rugby, the players are highly interdependent. What each player does constantly affects what the others need to do. A relay team works differently. Each runner completes their own leg, but the handovers must be coordinated. In gymnastics, people perform separately and their scores are added together to produce the team result. They contribute to the same outcome without performing the task together.

Leadership teams can operate in all three ways - sometimes within the same meeting.

One director simply needs to update colleagues on work being done within their function. Another issue might bring an issue or proposal that requires several functions to coordinate their activities. Then something else may need the team to combine its knowledge and exercise judgement together.

The important question is whether people recognise which kind of work they are doing.

Does everybody need to contribute?

I’ve spoken to directors who say that they sometimes feel like a spare part in leadership team meetings. They're invited to contribute to a discussion, but have little to say because the issue doesn’t affect their function and they don’t have anything particularly useful to add.

Perhaps that doesn’t need to be a problem. Not everybody needs to have an opinion on everything. The team could acknowledge that an item is there to keep people informed, rather than expecting everyone to contribute because they happen to be in the room.

Getting the type of work wrong creates problems. Treating individual work as collective clogs up the agenda and can blur accountability. Treating coordinated work as individual creates surprises when one person’s actions affect somebody else. And treating genuinely collective work as a series of functional decisions pushes the work of joining up the team’s thinking, resolving the trade-offs and creating a coherent organisational response back onto the CEO rather than using the team's collective intelligence.

Collective work is needed when no one person has enough of the picture to deal with an issue well, or when a decision in one area has important consequences elsewhere.

The question is: who needs to think this through together? Sometimes that will be the whole leadership team. Sometimes it will be just two or three people.

Get this right and the team makes better use of the knowledge available across the organisation. Decisions take account of what they will mean in practice, people understand the thinking behind them and the different parts of the organisation are more likely to act coherently. Get it wrong and important information is missed, decisions made in one area create problems in another, and the CEO is left trying to join everything up afterwards.

Using functional knowledge for the whole organisation

Often, senior leaders have to hold two responsibilities at once. They are there partly because of what they know about their own functions, and have a legitimate responsibility to raise legitimate concerns. Protecting a function’s capacity may also be protecting the organisation’s ability to deliver.

But they're also stewards of the organisation as a whole. The challenge is to explain why the needs of their function matter to the organisation, rather than simply arguing for the outcome their function would prefer. It means being open about the risks, pressures and likely consequences you can see from where you sit. But it also means listening properly to what other leaders can see and allowing that information to affect your own understanding.

Otherwise, the discussion can become a collection of positions. Each director explains what matters to their function, then waits for the CEO to sort out the competing demands.

The challenge is to explain why the needs of their function matter to the organisation, rather than simply arguing for the outcome their function would prefer.

Collective work asks more of the team. What does this new information change? What haven’t we considered? What looks sensible from one part of the organisation but creates a problem somewhere else? Which concern needs to carry most weight in this situation?

That doesn’t mean good discussion will always produce agreement. Capable leaders can understand one another’s perspectives perfectly well and still disagree about risk, timing or priorities. The purpose of collective work is not to achieve consensus. It's to make sure the decision is informed by the knowledge and judgement available across the team. Sometimes the team will decide together. Sometimes the CEO or another leader will hear the different perspectives and make the final call. What matters is that everyone understands where the differences lie, what trade-off is being made and who has the authority to decide.

Collective leadership continues after the decision

The team’s work doesn’t finish when the decision has been made. People need to understand the reasoning well enough to communicate the decision honestly and consistently, act in line with it and carry out their responsibilities, even if it isn’t the decision they would have made.

That doesn’t mean pretending that all concerns have disappeared. Material risks still need to be raised and monitored.

Responsibility for action may now become individual or coordinated again. Different functions will do different things, but leaders need to keep watching whether those separate actions still add up to what the team intended. As circumstances change, they also need to judge when they can adapt within their own authority and when an issue needs to come back to the team.

And eventually, the team needs to look at what happened, what it got right and what it needs to learn.

Not everything a leadership team does is collective work. But when collective work is needed, it involves more than bringing several senior people into the same conversation.

It means using their different knowledge and perspectives to understand the issue, make a sound judgement and create a response that works for the organisation as a whole.

That, for me, is what real collective work is.

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