What Makes a Group of Executives a Real Team? From Wageman, R., Nunes, D. A., Burruss, J. A., & Hackman, J. R. (2008). Senior leadership teams: What it takes to make them great. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Isobel Stevenson, Connecticut Center for School Change, istevenson@ctschoolchange.org

What Makes a Group of Executives a Real Team? Interdependent. In real leadership teams, members share responsibility for achieving a collective purpose. They still are responsible for their individual roles, but they also work together, rely on one another, and use each other’s experience, energy, and expertise to accomplish a collective, enterprise-affecting purpose

Bounded. Real senior leadership teams have clear boundaries Bounded. Real senior leadership teams have clear boundaries. Team members as well as outsiders know who is on the team and who isn’t. Stable. Real teams maintain a stable membership long enough for members to get to know one another’s special strengths and limitations and to learn how to work together well as a team.

Four Types of Senior Team Informational teams, to make the individual leaders better informed, better aligned, and more able to do their jobs superbly. Consultative teams, to provide necessary information, debate the relevant issues, and act as a sounding board before the chief executive makes the call. Coordinating teams, to manage the operational interdependencies of the organization. Decision-making teams make the small number of critical decisions that are most consequential for the organization as a whole.

Clarity Of the three qualities of a great leadership team purpose—consequentiality, challenge, and clarity—establishing clarity is the hardest. Many chief executives make the mistake of assuming that if the team members know the organization’s mission statement, then they understand the team’s purpose. The organization’s mission does not provide guidance about what the leadership team members do as a group.

The second common threat to teams’ clarity of purpose is the absence of a shared understanding of the organization’s strategy: the organization’s distinctive approach to establishing sustainable performance. Not adequate to assume that having heard the strategy members have a shared understanding of what it will look like in practice or their role in implementing it. A lack of shared understanding of strategy arises when team members are not given the chance to calibrate their understanding of how the words in their strategy documents translate into organizational action.