Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.      - Sir Winston Churchill

"A team is a group organized to work together to accomplish a set of objectives that cannot be

achieved effectively by individuals."

Characteristics of a Team

There must be an awareness of unity on the part of all its members. There must be interpersonal relationship. Members must have a chance to

contribute, learn from and work with others. The members must have the ability to act together toward a common goal.

Ten characteristics of well-functioning teams:

Purpose: Members proudly share a sense of why the team exists and are invested in accomplishing its mission and goals.

Priorities: Members know what needs to be done next, by whom, and by when to achieve team goals.

Roles: Members know their roles in getting tasks done and when to allow a more skillful member to do a certain task.

Decisions: Authority and decision-making lines are clearly understood. Conflict: Conflict is dealt with openly and is considered important to decision-

making and personal growth. Personal traits: members feel their unique personalities are appreciated and well

utilized. Norms: Group norms for working together are set and seen as standards for every

one in the groups. Effectiveness: Members find team meetings efficient and productive and look

forward to this time together. Success: Members know clearly when the team has met with success and share in

this equally and proudly. Training: Opportunities for feedback and updating skills are provided and taken

advantage of by team members.

Guidelines for effective team membership:

Contribute ideas and solutions Recognize and respect differences in others Value the ideas and contributions of others Listen and share information Ask questions and get clarification Participate fully and keep your commitments Be flexible and respect the partnership created by a team -- strive for the "win-

win" Have fun and care about the team and the outcomes.

Characteristics of a high-performance team:

Participative leadership - creating an interdependence by empowering, freeing up and serving others.

Shared responsibility - establishing an environment in which all team members feel responsibility as the manager for the performance team.

Aligned on purpose - having a sense of common purpose about why the team exists and the function it serves.

High communication - creating a climate of trust and open, honest communication.

Future focused - seeing change as an opportunity for growth. Focused on task - keeping meetings and interactions focused on results. Creative talents - applying individual talents and creativity. Rapid response - identifying and acting on opportunities.

Leadership

In common usage, leadership generally refers to:

the position or office of an authority figure, such as a President a position of office associated with technical skill or experience, as in a team

leader or a chief engineer a group or person in the vanguard of some trend or movement, as in "market

leadership" a group of influential people, such as a union leadership guidance or direction, as in the phrase "the emperor is not providing much

leadership" capacity or ability to lead, as in the phrase "she exercised effective leadership"

If we define leadership simply as "influencing others to some purpose" and we define followership as "becoming influenced by others to accept some purpose", then leadership and followership emerge as two sides of the same coin. In this scenario, leadership -- whether successful or not -- has not occurred until at least one follower joins in. Likewise, no followership exists without someone or something (not necessarily a leader) to follow. However, in this latter case, the leadership need not be deliberate or even conscious, that is, followers can follow someone who is not trying to lead. Some see "unconscious leadership" as a dubious concept, however. Many, using a different definition of leadership, would claim that it does not classify as leadership at all because no deliberate intention to lead exists. Unconscious "leading by example" may exemplify this.

The word "leadership" itself can mean a collective group of leaders, or it can mean the special -- if not mystical -- characteristics of a celebrity figurehead (compare hero). Yet other usages have a leadership which does not lead, but to which one simply shows respect (compare the courtesy title reverend). Aside from the prestige-role sometimes granted to inspirational leaders, a more mundane usage of the word "leadership" can designate "current front-runners": someone can for a time take over the lead in a race, for example; or a corporation or a product can hold a position of market leadership.

In would-be controlling groups such as political parties, ruling elites, and other belief-based enterprises like religions or businesses, the idea of leadership can become a Holy Grail and people can come to expect transformational change stemming from the leader; such entities encourage their followers and believers to worship leadership, to respect it, and to strive to become proficient in it. Followers in such a situation may become uncritically obedient. Note the different connotations of a synonym of the word "leader" adopted from the German Führer, and its acompanying ideas on the Führerprinzip which proliferated a hierarchy of leaders. Alternatives to the cult of leadership include co-operative ventures, collegiality, consensus, anarchism, and democracy.

Leadership as a position of authority

In On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle demonstrated the concept of leadership as a position of authority. In praising Oliver Cromwell's use of power to bring King Charles I to trial and eventual beheading, he wrote the following: "Let us remark, meanwhile, how indispensable everywhere a King is, in all movements of men. It is strikingly shown, in this very War, what becomes of men when they cannot find a Chief Man, and their enemies can."

From this viewpoint, leadership emerges when an entity as "leader" contrives to receive deference from other entities who become "followers". And as the passage from Carlyle demonstrates, the process of getting deference can become competitive in that the emerging "leader" draws "followers" from the factions of the prior or alternative "leaders".

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the American Founders rejected the idea of a monarch. But they still proposed leadership as a position of authority, with the authority split into three powers, the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. That is, under the American theory, the authority of leadership derived from the power of the voters conveyed through the electoral college. And many individuals shared in leadership as a position of authority, including the many legislators in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Leadership as a position of authority, comparison with other apes

Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, in Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence present the empirical evidence that only humans and chimpanzees, among all the animals living on earth, share a similar tendency for violence, territoriality, and competition for uniting behind the one chief male of the land. (Note the status of chimpanzees as humans' closest species-relatives: humans inherited 98% of their genes from the ancestors of the chimpanzees.

Leadership cycles

If a group or an organization wants or expects identifiable leadership, it will require processes for appointing/acquiring and replacing leaders.

Traditional closed groups rely on bloodlines or seniority to select leaders and/or leadership candidates: monarchies, tribal chiefdoms, oligarchies and aristocratic societies rely on (and often define their institutions by) such methods.

Competence or perceived competence provides a possible basis for selecting leadership elites more broadly. Political lobbying may prove necessary in electoral systems, but immediately demonstrated skill and character may secure leadership in smaller groups such as gangs.

Many organizations and groups aim to identify, foster and promote leadership potential or ability - especially among younger members of society. See for example the Scouting movement. For a specific environment, see leadership development.

The issues of succession planning or legitimation become important at times when leadership might or must change due to term expiration.

Orthogonality and leadership

Those who sing the praises of leadership or of certain types of leadership may encounter problems in implementing consistent leadership structures. For example, a pyramidical structure in which authority consistently emanates from the summit can kill all initiative and leave no path for grooming future leaders. Similiarly, a belief in universal direct democracy may become unwieldy, and a system consisting of nothing but representative leaders may well become stymied in committees.

Thus, many leadership systems promote different rules for different levels of leadership. Hereditary autocrats meet in the United Nations on equal representative terms with elected governments in a collegial leadership. Or individual local democracies may assign some of their powers to temporary dictators in emergencies, as in ancient Rome. Hierarchies intermingle with equality of opportunity at different levels.

Support-structures for leadership

Though advocates of the "big man" school of visionary leadership would have us believe that charisma and personality alone can work miracles, most leaders operate within a structure of supporters and executive agents who carry out and monitor the expressed or filtered-down will of the leader. This undercutting of the importance of leadership may serve as a reminder of the existence of the follower: compare followership.

A more or less formal bureaucracy (in the Weberian sense) can throw up a colorless nonentity as an entirely effective leader: this phenomenon may occur (for example) in a politburo environment. On the other hand, a big-picture grand-vision leader may foster another sort of hierarchy: a fetish of leadership amongst subordinate sub-leaders, encouraged to seize resources and apply to the supreme leader only for ultimate arbitration: this approximates to Adolf Hitler's leadership style. Other leaders build coalitions and alliances: political parties abound with this type of leader. Still others depend on rapport with the masses: they labor on the shop-floor or stand in the front-line of battle, leading by example.

Determining what makes effective "leadership"

In comparing various leadership styles in many cultures, academic studies have examined the patterns in which leadership emerges and then fades, sometimes by natural succession according to established rules and sometimes by the imposition of brute force. Some scholars choose to judge the effectiveness of leadership by the size of the following that the "leader" can muster. By this standard, Adolf Hitler became a very effective leader even if through delusional promises and coercive troops.

Other scholars, assuming no doubt relatively fluid and dynamic societal background situations, maintain that an effective leader must unite followers to a shared vision that offers "true" value, integrity, and trust to transform and improve an organization and society at large. James MacGregor Burns calls this leadership that delivers true value, integrity, and trust transformational leadership. He distinguishes such leadership from "mere" transactional leadership that gets power by doing whatever will get more followers. But problems arise in quantifying the transformational quality of leadership -- evaluation of that quality seems more difficult to quantify than merely counting the followers that the straw man of transactional leadership James MacGregor Burns has set as a primary standard for effectiveness. Thus transformational leadership requires an evaluation of quality independent of the market demand that exhibits in the number of followers.

Suggested qualities of leadership

Studies of leadership have suggested qualities that people often associate with leadership. They include:

Talent and technical/specific skill at some task at hand Initiative and entrepreneurial drive Charismatic inspiration - attractiveness to others and the ability to leverage this

esteem to motivate others Preoccupation with a rôle - a dedication that consumes much of leaders' life -

service to a cause A clear sense of purpose (or mission) - clear goals - focus - commitment Results-orientation - directing every action towards a mission - prioritizing

activities to spend time where results most accrue Optimism - very few pessimists become leaders Rejection of determinism - belief in one's ability to "make a difference" Ability to encourage and nurture those that report to them - delegate in such a way

as people will grow Rôle models - leaders may adopt a persona that encapsulates their mission and

lead by example Self-knowledge (in non-bureaucratic structures) Self-awareness - the ability to "lead" one's own self prior to leading other selves

simililarly With regards to people and to projects, the ability to choose winners - recognizing

that, unlike with skills, one cannot (in general) teach attitude. Note that "picking winners" ("choosing winners") carries implications of gamblers' luck as well as of the capacity to take risks, but "true" leaders, like gamblers but unlike "false" leaders, base their decisions on realistic insight (and usually on many other factors partially derived from "real" wisdom).

Understanding what others say, rather than listening to how they say things - this could partly sum this quality up as "walking in someone else's shoes" (to use a common cliché)

Leadership and vision

No matter how one defines leadership, it always involves an element of vision. A leader (or group of leaders) must have a vision of the future or of the past or of the present and must succeed in communicating such a vision to others. This vision, for effectiveness, should allegedly:

appear as a simple, yet vibrant, image in the mind of the leader describe a future/past/present state, credible and preferable to the

present/past/future state act as a bridge between the current state and a future optimum state appear desirable enough to energize followers succeed in speaking to followers at an emotional or spiritual level (logical appeals

by themselves seldom create a following; practical alternatives don't count)

For leadership to occur - according to the "vision: theory - some people ("leaders") must communicate the vision to others ("followers") in such a way that the followers adopt the vision as their own. Leaders must not just see the vision themselves, they must have the ability to get others to see it also. Numerous techniques aid in this process, including: narratives, metaphors, symbolic actions, leading by example, incentives, and penalties.

Stacey (1992) has suggested that the emphasis on vision puts an unrealistic burden on the leader. Such emphasis appears to perpetuate the myth that an organization must depend on a single, uncommonly talented individual to decide what to do. Stacey claims that this fosters a culture of dependency and conformity in which followers take no pro-active incentives and do not think independently.

Leadership by a group

In contrast to tolerating leadership as a position of authority, some highly successful organizations have adopted a pragmatic approach when they found that the role of boss costs too much in team performance. That is, in some situations, the maintenance of the boss becomes too expensive -- either by draining the resources of the group as a whole, or by impeding the creativity within the team, even unintentionally.

For example, the Orpheus orchestra has performed for over thirty years without a conductor -- that is, without a boss -- for a team of over 25 members, has drawn discriminating audiences, and has produced over 60 recordings for Deutsche Grammophon in successful competition with other world-class orchestras which feature autocratic or charismatic conductors.

Rather than an autocratic or charismatic conductor deciding the overall conception of a work and then dictating how each individual is to perform the individual tasks, the Orpheus team generally selects a different "core group" for each piece of music; the core group as a team work out the details of the piece; the core group present their idea to the whole team; each member of the whole team then participates in refining the final conception, rehearsal, and product, including checking from various places in the auditorium how the sound balances and verifying the quality of the final recording -- all without a boss.

At times the entire Orpheus team may follow someone, but whom the team follows rotates from task to task among the members that the team finds capable. The orchestra has developed seminars and training sessions for adapting the Orpheus Process to business.

A leader’s behavior is acceptable to subordinates when viewed as a source of satisfaction, and motivational when need satisfaction is contingent on performance, and the leader facilitates, coaches, and rewards effective performance. Path-Goal Theory identifies achievement-oriented, directive, participative, and supportive leadership styles.

In achievement-oriented leadership, the leader sets challenging goals for followers, expects them to perform at their highest level, and shows confidence in their ability to meet this expectation. This style is appropriate when the follower suffers from a lack of job challenge.

In directive leadership, the leader lets followers know what is expected of them and tells them how to perform their tasks. This style is appropriate when the follower has an ambiguous job.

Participative leadership involves leaders consulting with followers and asking for their suggestions before making a decision. This style is appropriate when the follower is using improper procedures or is making poor decisions.

In supportive leadership, the leader is friendly and approachable. The leader shows concern for the followers’ psychological well being. This style is appropriate when the followers lack confidence.

Path-Goal Theory assumes that leaders are flexible and that they can change their style, as situations require. The theory proposes two contingency variables, such as environment and follower characteristics, that moderate the leader behavior-outcome relationship. Environment is outside the control of the follower-task structure, authority system, and work group. Environmental factors determine the type of leader behavior required if the follower outcomes are to be maximized. Follower characteristics are the locus of control, experience, and perceived ability. Personal characteristics of subordinates determine how the environment and leader are interpreted. Effective leaders clarify the path to help their followers achieve goals and make the journey easier by reducing roadblocks and pitfalls. Research demonstrates that member performance and satisfaction are positively influenced when the leader compensates for the shortcomings in either the member or the environment.

Ten Ways to Identify a Promising Person

The most gifted athletes rarely make good coaches. The best violinist will not necessarily make the best conductor. Nor will the best teacher necessarily make the best head of the department.

So it's critical to distinguish between the skill of performance and the skill of leading the performance, two entirely different skills.

It's also important to determine whether a person is capable of learning leadership. The natural leader will stand out. The trick is identifying those who are capable of learning leadership over time.

Here are several traits to help identify whether someone is capable of learning to lead.

Leadership in the past. The best predictor of the future is the past. The capacity to create or catch vision. When I talk to people about the future, I

want their eyes to light up. I want them to ask the right questions about what I'm talking about.

Willingness to work. A person who doesn't feel the thrill of challenge is not a potential leader. The founder of Jefferson Standard built a successful insurance company from scratch. He assembled some of the greatest insurance people by simply asking, "Why don't you come and help me build something great?"

A constructive spirit of discontent. Some people would call this criticism, but there's a big difference in being constructively discontent and being critical. If somebody says, "There's got to be a better way to do this," I see if there's leadership potential by asking, "Have you ever thought about what that better way might be?" If he says no, he is being critical, not constructive. But if he says yes, he's challenged by a constructive spirit of discontent. That's the unscratchable itch. It is always in the leader. People locked in the status quo are not leaders. I ask of a potential leader, Does this person believe there is always a better way to do something?

Practical ideas. Highly original people are often not good leaders because they are unable to judge their output; they need somebody else to say, "This will work" or "This won't." Brainstorming is not a particularly helpful practice in leadership, because ideas need to stay practical. Not everybody with practical ideas is a leader, of course, but leaders seem to be able to identify which ideas are practical and which aren't.

A willingness to take responsibility. One night at the end of the second shift, I walked out of the plant and passed the porter. As head of operations, I had started my day at the beginning of the first shift. The porter said, "Mr. Smith, I sure wish I had your pay, but I don't want your worry." He equated responsibility and worry. He wanted to be able to drop his responsibility when he walked out the door and not carry it home. That's understandable, but it's not a trait in potential leaders. I thought about the porter's comment driving home. If the vice-president and the porter were paid the same money, I'd still want to be vice-president. Carrying responsibility doesn't intimidate me, because the joy of accomplishment-the vicarious feeling of contributing to other people-is what leadership is all about.

A completion factor. I might test somebody's commitment by putting him or her on a task force. I'd find a problem that needs solving and assemble a group of people whose normal responsibilities don't include tackling that problem. The person who grabs hold of the problem and won't let go, like a dog with a bone, has leadership potential. This quality is critical in leaders, for there will be times when nothing but one's iron will says, "Keep going." Dale Carnegie used to say, "I know men in the ranks who will not stay in the ranks. Why? Because they have the ability to get things done." In the military, it is called "completed staff work." With potential leaders, when the work comes in, it's complete. The half-cooked meal isn't good enough.

Mental toughness. No one can lead without being criticized or without facing discouragement. A potential leader needs a mental toughness. I don't want a mean leader; I want a tough-minded leader who sees things as they are and will pay the price. Leadership creates a certain separation from one's peers. The separation comes from carrying responsibility that only you can carry.

Peer respect. Peer respect doesn't reveal ability, but it can show character and personality. Maxey Jarmen, one of the business world’s most successful entrepreneurs, used to say, "It isn't important that people like you. It's important that they respect you. They may like you but not follow you. If they respect you, they'll follow you, even if perhaps they don't like you."

Family respect. I also look at the family of a potential leader: Do they respect him or her? Fifteen years ago, my daughter said, "Dad, one thing I appreciate is that after you speak and I walk up, you are always attentive to me. You seem proud of me." That meant a lot to me. If respect isn't there, that's also visible. The family's feelings toward someone reveal much about his or her potential to lead.

A quality that makes people listen to them. Potential leaders have a "holding court" quality about them. When they speak, people listen. Other people may talk a great deal, but nobody listens to them. They're making a speech; they're not giving leadership. I take notice of people to whom others listen.