Poor leadership is often cited as a major cause of team failure. So surely good leadership should make for an effective team. Not necessarily so. Sometimes something that looks good can have an unwitting negative effect on something else.
I’ve been inspired by two sources for this Blog. Firstly, I recently observed a team meeting where the line manager showed strong leadership, listening to everyone’s contributions, empowering his team, encouraging them to sort things out amongst themselves and keeping the topic focused and progressive. At first glance it looked impressive. But at the end of the meeting, all the team members had axes to grind, including with each other. This isn’t good teaming. What was really going on?
Secondly, many years ago Chris Argyris wrote an HBR paper called “Good communication that blocks learning”. In it, he showed how behaviours that appear good can actually cause deeper problems. It’s the sort of article that takes several readings to grasp the full implications of what the author is saying – at least it did for me. It’s well worth a read (or two!).
Argyris’ work on Double Loop Learning is key in his article. Single loop learning leads to relatively minor adjustments, limited by assumptions made about the context within which the learning is taking place. By contrast, double loop learning addresses these assumptions, allowing learning to break free of the limits of the context and make adjustments that are much deeper in both meaning and potential.
Let us look at what the leader was doing and how to make sense of it using single and double loop learning.
What was the Leader doing?
During the team meeting the leader invited everyone to share an update, hearing each person in turn. Everyone had a chance to contribute and there were discussions about various topics. The main topic was developing a series of options for moving forward as a team. The line manager empowered the team members to develop those options after the meeting ready to bring back to a subsequent meeting to decide.
It was clear that various team members would have to work through some potential disagreements together if some of the options were to work. The meeting was held to time and all the team members left with various actions to complete before the next meeting.
Right at the end the line manager said what a successful meeting it had been as he had not taken any actions away himself, an indication of that fact that he had fully empowered his team.
What is the single loop learning from this?
The leader had learned over many years how to run effective meetings. For him and perhaps for the team, fully effective meetings meant coordinating the team’s work within the allotted time and ensuring that the team, rather than him, did that work. For any leader aspiring to achieve this level of efficiency it takes a lot of learning. For instance, a line manager needs to learn:
- Not to talk too much but to ask questions of the team to get them to speak up
- To have some structure, but also enough freedom for discussion
- To ensure everyone is included in the discussion
- To avoid raising difficult issues within team meetings as it makes people uncomfortable
- To take issues “off line” for those involved to sort out
- To empower team members to take action between meetings whilst ensuring the line manager is present for the critical decision making itself
- To artfully bring the meeting to a close.
- To leave the meeting without any actions as a key measure of success for empowerment of the team
These, and no doubt more, are the single loop lessons which many leaders learn in order to run effective meetings. This is good leadership, right?
What’s really going on?
During the meeting it was clear there were disagreements amongst team members – either on topics or tensions between roles. Some of these were articulated respectfully in the meeting, whilst others were implied. But some were hidden during the meeting, and only highlighted to me by team members once the meeting was over.
Watching the dynamics between the team showed tensions between various team members. What was interesting is that the line manager expected the team members to resolve these tensions and disagreements outside the team meeting – and not including him.
What’s a Double Loop Learning perspective?
To appreciate the double loop learning perspective we need to identify some key assumptions that everyone is making. When Argyris talks about assumptions, these are not the sort of assumptions that are often mentioned in planning and strategy documents – such as “we assume that staff retention rates remain the same”, or “we assume inflation doesn’t rise above 4%”. These sorts of assumptions might be articulated as “known, unknowns”.
By contrast, Argyris’ assumptions are more “unknown, unknowns” – what we take for granted and therefore don’t (and therefore can’t) question. These assumptions effectively cage us within a context which we believe is fixed. Yet by identifying, and therefore questioning, our taken-for-granted assumptions, we have the potential to break free of our caged context, liberating us to see things differently and act on that differently.
It is one of the main reasons why Argyris’ article takes several readings to fully comprehend. If you read it with single loop learning lens it won’t make sense because you can’t see the problems he’s highlighting. Only after a second (or third or even more) reading can you start to glimpse the assumptions that are being made – by the case studies in the article and you as the reader. As I’ve said, well worth a read!
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The Assumptions being made in this context
For me, there was one significant assumption – that the Team Leader and the Team are being treated as separate entities. This is difficult to see because it is so mainstream. In organisations throughout the world, organisational diagrams show line managers and direct reports in a hierarchical structure. This creates a separation that plays out in so many different ways. The organogram is symptomatic, not the cause of the separation.
In hierarchies the line manager has accountability for what the team does. As such line managers are the ultimate decision makers, from objectives to performance to rewards. Such decisions wield huge power. To help line managers wield this power, organisations provide systems and processes to introduce fairness and consistency such as performance reviews, yearly objective setting, reward structures, etc. It’s legitimised so much, team members conform to the line manager’s power without question.
Such centralisation of power can slow performance down because work doesn’t go faster than the ability of the line manager. Line managers are therefore encouraged to empower their people and this is exactly what the line manager in our team meeting was doing. By ensuring his team, not him, took away all the actions, it not only proved his empowerment, but also ensured he had less work to do.
But within the hierarchy, any empowerment can easily be rescinded and the line manager can take it all back – afterall they are ultimately accountable for the performance of the team..
What would it look like if it was different?
Teams are not hierarchies where line managers stand above their team. In teams, leaders are within the team. Research on teams by Wageman, Hackman and Katzenbach and Smith all show that high performing teams take mutual accountability for their collective performance. That means everyone equally cares for the value they create together, not just one “ultimate” person.
What enables mutual accountability to happen is for each person in the team to bring different capabilities, roles and skills. The leader is therefore just one of those differences. Everyone else then brings their difference to the team in a way that means the team depends on everyone else to create that value. This is crucial to create a team that is interdependent. The act of leadership isn’t about being the ultimate decision maker as in the hierarchy, it’s about creating the conditions for the team to make their decisions, to build relationships which rely on each other to implement those decisions and for enabling the team to review its own performance in a way that means everyone cares equally.
One key indicator of a team being created is the ability for the team to disagree with each other within team meetings. This is important because disagreement shows people care. When disagreements are raised, one of the actions a leader can take is to support the exploration of that disagreement, not taking it “off line” and not asking people to resolve it “outside the team”. Making disagreement a teaming issue legitimises it. Indeed it makes it a vital element of teaming.
All the researchers on interdependent teams identify disagreement as a key enabler of high performance. Good teaming requires disagreement so that what is finally agreed has been fully thought through. This is why psychological safety is so important – it provides the security required to take the risks needed for high performance.
How would a team operate after addressing this assumption?
A team which has a team leader as a member of the team looks very different from the line manager-led meeting. And the principle thing that the team leader will pay attention to is identifying and working through disagreement. By identifying disagreements a leader will:
- Normalise raising issues within the team
- Invest team time on working through those disagreements together – afterall, everyone will rely on it being worked through successfully
- Develop ways for the team to work through those disagreements together – better, sooner
- Build trust through psychological safety so that team voices and can work through disagreements
- Helps the team to feel mutually accountable.
What is the double loop learning here?
It’s tough for leaders in hierarchical organisations to override the culture created through power wielding line management structures. But not impossible. To make a difference you need to recognise the overarching assumption being made – and that takes double loop learning.
Learn to be inside the team.
This means you work with the team, not stand over the team. It means you role model vulnerability and also role model behaviours that create psychological safety. It means you attend to the issues of the team, not send them away to sort it out themselves. It means you invite disagreement rather than telling people to “take it off line”. You support how the team works through the disagreements, being present with them in the room, because you care about the way the team grapples with the disagreement.
And you attend to how the decisions are being made within the team more than what the decisions are.
Other OCH resources on this topic
YOu might also look at a previous blog “Understanding Inter-Dependent and Extra-Dependent Teams” as it highlights the stages moving from hierarchy to interdependent teams, but it goes further still, highlighting assumptions people make even about interdependent teams.
And for those who like videos, this short video does something similar: Three ways people think about teams
