Book Excerpt
Imperatives for Leaders
Excerpt from J. Richard Hackman's Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performance. Reprint by permission of Harvard Business School Press 2002. Copyright © 2002.
By J. Richard Hackman

This article appeared in 2003

A while back I needed to get from Boston to New York for a research meeting. There were multiple ways I could have accomplished that--by airplane, by train, by bus, even by driving my own car five hours to the meeting site. Each mode of transportation had distinctive advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, convenience, vulnerability to weather delays, and the possibility of working while traveling. Still, each and every one of them would eventually have gotten me to New York. That fact exemplifies for individual choice what systems theorists call equifinality. According to the principle of equifinality, there are many different ways that an open system such as a person, team, or organization can behave and still achieve the same outcome--in this case, to get to New York.

I drove. Driving was a little cheaper than the other options, but it took more time and offered zero possibility of getting work done en route. A colleague, surprised at my choice, used the phrase "really dumb" to characterize it. But I like to drive. Even more, I like having the flexibility of leaving the instant I am ready to go, and having a choice about the route I will take. So I picked a way to get to New York that suited me just fine. My colleague would have made a different choice -but also would have gotten to New York. That is what is meant by equifinality.

As I write this, I am starting to think about the first meeting of a new research group that I will convene next month. How should I handle the first few minutes of that meeting? Should I begin by telling members the main objectives for the research project? Or should I ease into the purposes of the project gradually, perhaps starting out by inviting each member to talk briefly about his or her own research interests? Or should I prepare a read-ahead handout describing the project and open the meeting by asking members for their reactions and questions? Should I strike a formal, task - oriented tone, or be more casual and interpersonally oriented?

Once again, there is no right answer to those questions, no one best way for me to act as I launch my team. What is important is that somehow I get conditions established that help the group get off to a good start. This involves three activities: helping the team come to terms with its immediate task and ensuring that all understand how it is linked to the team's broader purposes; bounding the group as a performing unit all members understand, and accept, that we, collectively, are the people responsible for the project; and establishing the basic norms of conduct that will guide member behavior in the initial phase of the group's life. Those are the things I must accomplish in that first meeting. But I have enormous latitude in how I do that.

In fact, my actual behavior at the first meeting will be significantly shaped by the circumstances of the moment: Is everybody present when the meeting is supposed to start? Do all members already know one another? How much enthusiasm do they seem to have for the project? My behavior also will depend on my own preferred style of operating: Am I more comfortable taking an active, assertive leadership role, or do I prefer to solicit input from others and then summarize and integrate their ideas? Do I generally lead using a matter -of - fact style, or do I like to liven things up with humor? Am I someone who can describe a project in a way that engenders shared excitement in a group, or am I better at helping each member identify the particular aspects of the work that he or she personally finds most engaging? These and other considerations too numerous to mention - and certainly too complex to preprogram even with the most complicated decision tree - together will shape the actual behaviors I exhibit at the research group meeting. There are many different ways that I can create the conditions for a good team launch, and no particular style of leading is necessarily better than others for getting those conditions in place. The principle of equifinality applies even in settings where much of what a leader must do is technologically determined or dictated by required procedures. The airline flight deck is one such setting. Because small deviations from proper procedures by a cockpit crew can spawn highly adverse consequences, much of the behavior of the crew leader, the captain, is highly standardized. Members can count on each new captain conducting some kind of briefing before the first flight begins, for example, because it is required by most airlines. What captains actually do in those briefings, however, is mostly up to them. The way a captain handles the briefing establishes a pattern of interaction that persists throughout a crew's life. But do captains who are viewed by their peers as excellent team leaders behave differently in their initial crew briefings than do those who are seen as only so-so team leaders?

To find out researcher Robert Ginnett asked flight standards staff who regularly fly with the airline's pilots to ensure that the highest standards of professionalism are maintained, to identify captains who were fine pilots but whom they considered to be either excellent or marginal team leaders. He then selected a number of captains in each of these two groups and, without knowing whether the nominators had placed a given captain in the excellent or marginal category, observed that captain's briefings of two different crews on two different occasions. Ginnett captured everything that happened from the moment pilots and flight attendants began to arrive in the briefing area, where they sat or stood - the content and style of the leader's remarks, how much other crew members participated, how long the briefing lasted, and more.

His first pass through the data revealed enormous variation among captains in both groups in the length, style, and content of their briefings. Closer inspection, however, showed that all of the captains who had been nominated as excellent team leaders accomplished, in their own idiosyncratic way, three things. First, they established the legitimacy of their authority as crew leader. They exhibited neither a laissez-faire nor fully democratic approach in conducting the briefing. They communicated their own authority and competence by unapologetically specifying what they sought and expected from the crew but they also identified without embarrassment or apology the matters about which they needed information or assistance from others. Second, they established the boundaries of the crew, taking special care to ensure that all members, pilots and cabin crew alike, recognized that they shared responsibility for the flight and for the flying experience of their passengers. And third, they affirmed the norms of conduct that would guide crew behavior, that is, their expectations about how members would act and interact, particularly regarding how they would communicate and coordinate with one another.

It is noteworthy that the captains gave less attention in their briefings to the tasks that the crew would perform than has been observed for excellent leaders of other types of work teams. In airline operations, individual and collective tasks are defined and engineered in such detail that there is little need for the captain to clarify or reinforce what the crew is there to accomplish. Even so, the excellent captains often did give special reinforcement to the importance of keeping safety in the forefront of everyone's attention- and, once again, did so in their own idiosyncratic ways.

The great diversity of styles used by team leaders in launching their crews is seen not just when a team first comes together, but also in how leaders establish and maintain the other conditions that foster team effectiveness - clarifying a team's direction, getting its structure right, arranging for contextual supports, and ensuring that the team receives competent coaching at the appropriate times. Great team leaders we have studied obtained from their organizations most of what their teams needed to perform well. They tailored their attempts to influence the particularities of their roles and organizational circumstances, and [they] used the leadership styles and strategies that suited them best. There is no one right way to provide leadership to a work team.

Let me hasten to add, however, that there also are many wrong ways to go about creating the conditions for team effectiveness - strategies or styles that backfire or whose short-term benefits are negated by longterm liabilities. One way to get it wrong is to mislead or lie to those who are in a position to provide teams with the structures, resources, or supports they need in their work. Beyond the moral problems of lying, disingenuous strategies destroy the credibility of those who use them when, as inevitably happens, others discover that what is claimed cannot be trusted.

Another way to get it wrong is to ape someone else's style, or to follow prescriptions from a textbook or training course that specifies how good leaders are supposed to act. It always is embarrassing to observe someone trying to enact a leadership style that is not the person's own- such as the junior manager who admiringly adopts the style of the charismatic chief executive but succeeds only in calling attention to the enormity of their difference in competence. The junior manager would be better advised to cease practicing in front of a mirror and instead to spend that time and effort identifying and honing his or her own best style of leading. It can be just as embarrassing to observe someone who has learned from a textbook or management training course how good leaders behave, and who then attempts to act that way back at work. "What happened to Charlotte at that training course?" team members ask one another. "Well, let's just wait it out; she'll probably be back to normal soon." And indeed she will.

The third way to get it wrong is to relentlessly enact one's preferred manner of leading even in the face of data that it is not working very well, to keep on keeping on with a style that is indeed one's own and with which one may be quite comfortable but that consistently yields unanticipated and unfavorable results. Some leaders, for example, are most comfortable with what can be called a "command and control" style of leadership. They issue orders about what is to be done - not just by the team they are leading but also by their peers and even bosses. Sometimes command and control is fully appropriate - for example, among airline captains when a potentially catastrophic event such as an engine fire requires immediate and decisive action. On those occasions, the leader will be reinforced for using that style: "Immediate action was required, I issued the orders, team members did what I told them, and it worked out fine." But other times, such as in launching a team or exploring the implications for the team's performance strategy of a changing external environment, that style may be inimical to what needs to be accomplished. The leadership problem becomes severe when the leader does not recognize that his or her actions are not having the intended effects - or, worse, when the leader sees that things have not gone well but blames either the situation "Nobody could have turned that around - it was wired for failure" or team members "They just wouldn't do what I told them. They need to shape up real soon." In such cases, there is no opportunity for the leader to self-correct because he or she is not open to data that might suggest that the leader's own actions contributed to the poor outcome.

Ginnett observed this inability (or unwillingness) to selfcorrect among those captains in his study who had been nominated by their peers as marginal team leaders. Although there was as much variation in briefing style among the marginal captains as among those who were viewed as excellent team leaders, there were two major differences between the two groups. First, no matter what style they used in conducting their crew briefings, the marginal captains failed to establish the conditions needed for a good team launch. Second, all of them, again in their own ways, exhibited significant problems with control that made it nearly impossible for them to use their experiences to become more effective. Some of these captains were persistently overcontrolling, not asking for input from other team members and ignoring or diverting any suggestions that members did manage to make. Others were persistently undercontrolling, so democratic or laissez-faire in conducting their briefings that crew members were left uncertain about how the team was supposed to operate. Worst of all were captains who vacillated between overcontrolling and undercontrolling in ways and at times that could not be anticipated, which in some cases nearly incapacitated team members in carrying out their own parts of the work. Ginnett's observations documented that even though these captains' briefings did not go well, they either did not recognize the dysfunctional effects of their style or they were unable (or unwilling) to alter it. How they led was how they led, no matter what consequences ensued.

Excellent team leaders, by contrast, are aware of their natural styles - they know what they like to do, what they can do easily and well, and what they can accomplish only with difficulty if at all. They learn over time how to exploit their special strengths and preferences, and how to contain or circumvent their weaknesses. They attend carefully to the circumstances of the moment, and vary their behavior in real time to exploit unanticipated leadership opportunities and circumvent obstacles that risk blunting their initiatives. They may never have heard of the principle of equifinality, but they behave in accord with it. And, most important of all, they are continuously alert for signs that their actions may not be having their intended effects. For great leaders, expanding and strengthening their repertoire of leadership behaviors is a lifelong learning project.

J. Richard Hackman is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard University. He teaches and conducts research on a variety of topics in social and organizational psychology, including the design, dynamics, and leadership of organizational teams.