In recent years, there has been an increased recognition of the importance of leadership teams to the organization. In the past, the 'individual management space' was the crucial performance platform for good management. If you were in control of your own shop, you could usually get away with 'playing it safe' and de-prioritizing the work of the management team. And if the organization chose to part ways with a manager, it was typically because the manager wasn't performing well enough in relation to their own area of responsibility.
In the future, you will also be measured on your ability to contribute constructively to the overall performance of the management team. The rationale is that as the whole business becomes more and more complex, we become more and more dependent on each other. So if you're not able to be a team player in the management team and take co-responsibility for optimizing the cross-cutting value chains and joint strategic efforts, then you're a risk and in danger of being dropped.
Leadership teams are, if anything, the organizational structure and practices that can effectively bind an organization together across the board. In research, this is called behavioral integration. The term refers to the ability of the leadership team to make decisions together, share information and opinions openly, and work in a collectively coordinated way [1]. Several researchers highlight that this factor captures the essence of leadership team effectiveness. Our own research with 76 Danish leadership teams from 18 organizations shows that leadership teams with high behavioral integration create the best results for the organization, the leadership team and the individual leader [2].
But leadership teams can also develop into 'black holes' that suck productive energy, wellbeing and implementation power out of the individual leader and out of the organization. If this happens, it has far-reaching consequences for decision quality, implementation power and culture - the higher the leadership team, the greater the negative ripple effect throughout the organization. In addition, recent research shows that the degree of behavioral integration in top management teams not only has an impact on decision quality and implementation power, but also affects the organization's productive energy and employee well-being [3]. Thus, we can safely conclude that how effectively your organization's leadership teams interact from top to bottom and whether they deliver.
In this article, we will therefore focus on the organization's overall leadership team structure and how to create optimal conditions for leadership teams to succeed. This is based on the effect model for effective leadership teams [2] and inspired by the theory of the Leadership Pipeline [4] [5]. The basic point is that it is not enough to get individual leadership teams in the organization to function as 'high performance teams'; it is about getting the entire organizational chain of leadership teams to create results together.
Learn more about our training on creating effective leadership teams
LEAD offers certification in developing effective leadership teams with the development tool Effect.
With a certification, you will be equipped to use Effect in a development process in your organization at both group and organizational level.
Effective leadership teams on three organizational levels
The Leadership Pipeline theory [4] [5] is based on the assumption that good leadership depends on what needs to be led and that this is slightly different at different organizational levels. This understanding of leadership can be used to identify and define the most value-adding behaviors for leaders at different levels of management, creating a basis for better alignment of expectations, sharper feedback and continuous improvement for better leadership performance.
In our study of 76 Danish management teams, we investigated whether something similar applies to management teams at different organizational levels. We asked the question: Are there differences in the conditions, processes and results that characterize top management teams, middle management teams and front management teams? It turns out there are! But let's define these groups from each other before we look at the differences between top, middle and frontline management groups. The figure below depicts a generic management group string with the three levels of management groups - top management groups, middle management groups, frontline management groups. Top management groups are structurally defined as the group that reports to the organization's most senior leader. Frontline management teams are structurally defined as management teams where members of the management team report to frontline employees. Members of middle management groups report to managers, but may also manage specialized staff functions with employees reporting to them. In very large organizations, there can be multiple levels of middle management groups.
