In recent years, many organizations have become aware of the importance of having well-functioning management teams from top to bottom. At the same time, we often find that there is a lack of knowledge and competence about the special management discipline of leading a management team. Managing leadership teams is more than just one-to-one management. The shift from managing individuals to managing a leadership team involves a shift in one's personal leadership and leadership identity, and it also requires new leadership competencies. In this article, we present some of the most important keys to successful leadership team management. Some of the keywords are adapting your leadership to the role of a leader of leaders, mastering the management of cross-functional collaboration processes, being able to develop your leadership team and individual leaders to drive the business, and succeeding both together and individually.
The right leadership at the right level - leading leaders
A common pitfall in managing leadership teams is not leading at the right level. This point of attention stems from discontinuous leadership research and the Leadership Pipeline model, the main message of which is that good leadership depends on what you lead (Dahl & Molly-Søholm, 2012; Kaiser, 2011; Charan et al, 2001). That it is a challenging task to lead at the right level is supported by research on 'derailment', which studies what happens when leaders' careers go off track. The research shows that between 30-60% of all leaders' careers derail at some point. A common cause is failed transitions from one leadership position to another (Gentry & Chappelow, 2009; Lombardo & Eichinger, 1999; Hogan et al, 2010).
A successful transition from one level of leadership to another requires the leader to adjust their role understanding and leadership approach to fit the new leadership task and the new organizational level. Successfully transitioning to a new position fundamentally requires the leader to adapt to the new role by letting go of, retaining and adding new behaviors to their leadership repertoire (Freedman, 1998).
A successful transition from managing employees to managing leaders requires a shift in values, roles, behaviors and competencies. Some of the common pitfalls in this transition are:
- Focusing too much on the day-to-day professional management of your managers (managing them as if they were employees) and under-prioritizing the overall strategic management of the area
- delegating too little responsibility to your managers and wanting to have your hands in every detail
- Failure to set, drive and develop an effective leadership team that delivers cross-functional results
- taking over the direct management of professional employees and destroying your managers' management space and authority.
Two key leadership competencies - strategic leadership and cross-functional leadership
Two new leadership competencies that are essential for successful leadership of management teams are strategic and cross-functional leadership. What's new in strategic leadership is that it's no longer enough to be able to implement the strategic initiatives that come from the top. You are now expected to develop strategies for your own area and actively contribute to the development of overall strategies and initiatives. Another new competency is managing cross-functional processes and collaboration. It is crucial to clarify responsibilities and cross-functional interfaces in the management team with a special focus on dependencies, overlaps and gray areas. Finally, it is important to build cross-functional collaboration practices and guidelines for collaboration so that interfaces can be converted into collaboration spaces. This involves working to create mutual trust, timely communication, greater knowledge sharing and common goals (Elmholdt & Fogsgaard, 2014).
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Drive your territory through a strong leadership team
Another new discipline that the manager of managers must master is to run and develop their area through a strong management team and not through the management of individual managers, which corresponds to the direct management of professional employees at the previous management level. Through a three-year research project involving 76 Danish management teams, we have investigated what characterizes the most result-generating management teams. This knowledge is summarized in the effect model, which describes the results, prerequisites and processes that characterize particularly effective management teams and is based on the last 30 years of research on management teams (Bang, Midelfart, Molly-Søholm and Elmholdt, 2015).
Firstly, the most effective leadership teams are characterized by creating three types of Results:
- Added value for the organization, which is about producing organizational results that meet or exceed stakeholder and customer requirements and expectations.
- Added value for the management team, which is about the management team developing the members' ability to collaborate over time and thus the ability to create results.
- Added value for the individual, which is about the work in the management team contributing to the individual manager's personal and professional development as well as well-being and motivation.
In our experience, it's easy for leadership teams to focus unilaterally on creating added value for the organization. Unfortunately, the consequence of losing sight of the other two types of added value is often poorer performance in the long term, which our research confirms (Grøn, Elmholdt & Bang, 2016).
Another characteristic of the most effective leadership teams is that they possess a set of basic prerequisites that enable them to be particularly effective. Two crucial factors are:
- Clear purpose - does the leadership team have a clear shared understanding of what the leadership team is set up to produce?
- Real tasks - is the leadership team working on tasks that are aligned with their purpose, require a joint effort and can't be done as well elsewhere in the organization?
Finally, a third characteristic of the most effective management teams is that they have particularly well-developed process and collaboration skills, which covers the management team's collaboration on task solving and the managers' relational interaction. As a manager of managers, one of the most important and difficult tasks is to create an effective management team by ensuring the right conditions and process and collaboration skills (Grøn et al, 2016; Bang et al, 2015).
In addition, the leader of the management team must ensure that the management team as a whole operates at the right level, as per the earlier point about the right leadership at the right level. There's no point in individual leaders in the leadership team operating at the right level if the overall leadership team doesn't.
Remember to develop your individual leaders
Finally, managing leadership teams requires the ability to develop the leadership skills and expertise of your individual leaders. Individual leaders are the foundation for building an effective leadership team that creates great results together and individually. Developing individual leaders is fundamentally about being able to identify and develop their leadership competencies on two overarching dimensions, illustrated here via the versatile leadership model:
- How you lead - captures how leaders exert their influence and manage their people
- What you lead - captures how the leader drives their part of the organization forward and balances short-term profit and long-term growth (Sørensen & Grøn, 2015; Kaplan & Kaiser, 2006)
Summarizing
As we have tried to outline, managing leadership teams is a challenging and in many ways unique leadership discipline that requires more than one-to-one leadership. Successfully leading leadership teams requires, firstly, that the leader practices the right leadership at the right level, which often requires a transition in one's personal leadership and leadership identity. In addition, the leader must master some new leadership skills in terms of developing an effective leadership team to run their department and master the development of their individual leaders.
Research shows that most leaders have a strong preference for either Executive or Supportive leadership, and the same for Strategic and Operational leadership (Kaplan & Kaiser, 2006). This is a problem because effective leadership is characterized by the ability to balance these complementary leadership competencies (Sørensen & Grøn, 2015). One of the most important tasks for managers of managers is therefore to develop their managers' versatility - their ability to balance the four elements. Overall, the manager of managers must pay particular attention to two things in relation to development of the individual leader:
- Is the manager operating at the right level, as per the point about right management at the right level?
- Which leadership competencies should the leader develop in the future to ensure both short- and long-term success in their unit, as per the versatile leadership model's point about balanced leadership?
