[HN Gopher] Leaderless Teams
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Leaderless Teams
Author : mooreds
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-11-08 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brettmacfarlane.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brettmacfarlane.com)
| zppln wrote:
| I feel like I've suffered through this type of "leadership" for
| the past decade. When it works, it's great (although I feel
| you've kind of traded traditional authority for slight
| manipulation/scheming on part of the leader in such instances).
| These instances have also always involved more experienced team
| members.
|
| When it doesn't work it's useless. Instead of just getting told
| to drive straight off a cliff you get to wander around in a
| forest for a while and when you eventually find out you're lost
| it's way too late.
|
| As always (and as TFA points out) the person you pick for a
| leader still needs to actually possess whatever skill set your
| flavor of the month leadership style requires.
| prosaic-hacker wrote:
| I have experienced leaderless teams in my career (46 years) a
| handful of times. They formed around a problem that was
| unrecognized by Management (thankfully) but need to be solved. My
| best example was at a large SW dev firm in the late 80s. World
| wide electronic communications was need and faxes and leased
| lines connected to Decwriters were not good enough. I was
| assigned to the task as just one of my responsibility. A Single
| 1200 baud access to internet email at a university solved the
| problem. The problem expanded many people wanted the same service
| so we need someone (team member 2) who had access to a UNIX
| systems. Eight serial ports and 2400 internet connection to the
| first local ISP.
|
| Rinse repeat 5 years later 10 people, part time, supported all
| internet connections and intranet/internet web-servers including
| application without management sanction. Everyone had a service
| role in there own department. Being connected to the others meant
| we performed at a high level. We didn't have a leader per se but
| we all moved in a common direction.
|
| It lasted 8 years and finally several Directors discovered we
| existed as a team. Like sharks they each took a bite out of us,
| each one trying to become the dictator of the internet.
| Procedures were imposed. We were not allow to speak to each other
| with out going through the directors. Our individual productivity
| dropped. Angry internal clients screaming for the old way.
| Nothing got done. Three months later the director that won got
| half the people back together but we were not the same any more.
| I still found interesting work for 2 more years before finally
| leaving.
|
| Leaderless teams can work under the right conditions. I have
| tried to create them when I moved into management and it worked
| to some degree a few times. I did not lead or participate in the
| teams I just suggested people talk to each other know that the
| might click. I fed them problems (and resources) that I knew that
| they could solve that I knew would take more effort/time if we
| did it though channels. The individuals got recognition and I got
| my problems solved.
| keyle wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing that bit of history.
|
| I wonder what "Everyone had a service role in there own
| department." means?
| a_c wrote:
| To me authority and leadership are related but orthogonal.
|
| Authorities come from the ability to author. It is a creation
| right. The creation could be a story, a software and, probably
| what most most people have in mind about authority, a rule. On
| the other hand, leadership is the ability to, well, lead. You go
| where ever you want, but if you want people to follow, you need
| leadership.
|
| One can be a leader without authority. Think of a manager, while
| it might not be obvious, it is ultimately up to the "managee" to
| decide whether to carry out what the manager requires. You may
| fire, you may hire, but none of those guarantee you things
| getting done. Manager has no authority.
|
| Now, write a software. People wants to add a feature to YOUR
| software. You have absolute authority in deciding whether to
| accept.
| eternalban wrote:
| "What emerged from this exercise is that social class, education,
| gender and athletic ability were less important for leadership
| than the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the
| group."
|
| If this experiment was done 80 years and they selected military
| leadership positions based on this experiment (as it implies by
| reduced failure rate measure), I don't understand why OP used
| "gender" in the summary statement above? Did UK actually field
| troops in WWII led by women?
| samjohnson wrote:
| This is interesting, but it's not obvious to me what "the
| capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group"
| means in this context.
|
| It would be interesting to learn how that capacity was observed
| and measured. Has anyone seen the source research?
| gopher_space wrote:
| From how I've heard it used I'd say 'attend' means 'pay
| attention to' with undertones of care or service, in this
| context.
|
| You might have to dig a bit for the details. The following link
| could help, and the relevant part might be on pg. 8 (actual).
|
| Menzies is a rabbit hole, by the way. Her work during the war
| was dwarfed by what came afterwards.
|
| http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvo...
| thwayunion wrote:
| Leaderless models work very well in cases where tasks are stable,
| tasks can be assigned 1:1 to team members, team members more-or-
| less understand which tasks are for them, and any major changes
| to tasks can be coordinated on timeframes of months or years.
|
| The classic example is the traditional academic department at a
| non-research university.
|
| 1. The main deliverable are courses.
|
| 2. Each professor has some assigned courses. Once assigned, the
| professor can teach the course mostly in isolation. Additionally,
| the department tends to hire faculty in a way that makes sense
| for their curriculum; ie, the one Systems professor in a small CS
| department is probably going to be teaching the Systems
| electives.
|
| 3. The courses offered are mostly stable. When the curriculum
| changes, the changes can be managed in a distributed fashion
| because the change will take at least 6 months to 18 months
| before rollout.
|
| Therefore, a traditional academic department can run in a mostly
| leaderless fashion, with a department chair who plays a
| supporting role and perhaps a bit of a coaching role for newer
| hires.
|
| This doesn't work as well when tasks require close collaboration
| or when tasks evolve rapidly. It's not impossible. Just much
| harder. In those cases you tend to end up with a recognizable
| leadership vacuum, leading to sub-optimal outcomes mentioned in
| other comments.
|
| Anyways, that's all a bit of an aside and not directly germane to
| the article. But I do wonder if selecting leaders via leaderless
| teams exercises selects for leaders who work well in well-defined
| tasks with teams that are already partitioned into quite specific
| roles, but flail in environments with more dynamic tasks/goals.
| andrewla wrote:
| I don't think this was the main thrust of the article. The
| "leaderless team" concept was used to identify individuals
| within that group that were well-suited to leadership,
| specifically by identifying (and coaching) those individuals in
| the group who possess "the capacity for an individual to attend
| to others in the group".
|
| So more of a question of how to identify the emergence of
| organic leadership skills within a setting where there is no
| "assigned" leader.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The article is about how to identify promising leaders via a
| training exercise. It is not about using leaderless teams for
| actual work.
|
| Many of the comments here seem to be responding only to the
| title.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Whenever my boss was out on vacation and the subject came up, I
| just told anyone who asked that the team was in autonomous
| collective mode.
| nlstitch wrote:
| This is an empty, hollow article and its not like how I
| experienced groups for 20+ years.
|
| Just like with siblings in families or groups of friends,
| everyone naturally gets a role in a group; that's just how groups
| of people let alone animals work. Need to learn how to help
| others is fine and dandy, until it affects your own autonomy, let
| alone your identity, let alone the groups' autonomy. Than it will
| eat at you.
|
| Also what happens in groups is that if there is someone thats is
| truely not fit for a group, the whole group dynamic will change
| for the worse and it will try to oust it like a cancer. Until
| there is someone that speaks up (a leader) things will stay the
| same because the group will value the "being a group" above all
| else, even the goal of which the group was founded on.
|
| So? You actually need a good natural leader to guide you through
| some of the bad stuff. I think leaders are often misunderstood of
| being only authoritarian, but thats not the case.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > I think leaders are often misunderstood of being only
| authoritarian, but thats not the case.
|
| Leaders spend more time thinking about other people than anyone
| else in a company
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Lot's justs. Just the way it is. Just-so story?
|
| It's so just-obvious that it needs no argument. It's just
| natural.
|
| > I think leaders are often misunderstood of being only
| authoritarian, but thats not the case.
|
| Bosses (as in formal authorities, people who have formal
| control) have been rebranded as "leadership" exactly because
| "leader" sounds much more voluntary and consensual.
| jondeval wrote:
| This is an interesting article. My takeaway is that this British
| team during the war seems to have streamlined a process for
| surfacing leadership traits that are relevant in a military
| context.
|
| Lately, my view on what makes a good leader and what I'm trying
| to practice myself is simplifying down quite a bit. I've come to
| the conclusion that if there is one attribute you should optimize
| for, either for yourself as a potential leader, or in choosing
| someone to follow when selecting a venture, it's ... technical
| competence.
|
| Hopefully it's clear that I'm defining technical competence
| broadly to mean deep knowledge about the details of your
| particular domain. I think this definition is applicable to
| engineers, attorneys, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc.
|
| I think generalizable leadership attributes are important but
| purely supplementary to technical competence.
| theCrowing wrote:
| Leaderless teams always start to build a hierarchy on its own and
| the longer they exist the harder it gets to get new people into
| the group. It's really hard to manage.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep, leaderless teams are either ad-hoc for a short time, or
| they develop an unofficial hierarchy (often based on the
| complaining of certain people, not anything else).
| baxtr wrote:
| So basically your saying that leaderless teams are only
| leaderless for a short period
| andrewla wrote:
| This is exactly what the article seems to be talking about --
| how to identify the emergence of leadership where no formal
| hierarchy exists, and how to coach those individuals to find
| leaders.
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