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Home Ideas Library Leading Dynamic Teams: Alignment, Capability, Autonomy
10.13007/301
Ideas for Leaders #301
Leading Dynamic Teams: Alignment,
Capability, Autonomy
Key Concept
This Idea offers insights from a round-the-world yacht race to reveal several
key behaviours that make a real difference to team performance. Using sports
teams as a metaphor for understanding team dynamics in organizations and
the associated leadership challenges can be useful. However sports teams
generally seek short-term black or white goals; whereas in business, and life,
the time horizons are longer and the outcomes much more graded. Trans-
ocean sailing teams provide a more realistic environment for leadership
analysis.
Idea Summary
Trans-ocean sailing fits the organizational team/leadership metaphor well, as
in order to achieve the basic goal of getting from A to B, the team needs to
function effectively in handling the boat as well as navigating successfully.
Furthermore the unpredictable element of weather conditions simulates the
unpredictable nature of business environments, requiring team focus to be
rapidly changed from the planned activity to a critical survival one. This
situation rarely occurs in standard sports events.
Ashridge Business School studied the 2013 Clipper Round the World Yacht
Race to identify what behaviours and skills proved to be most effective in
achieving success in the event.
Lead researcher, Trudi West, conducted 77 interviews with 42 crew and
skippers at four key stop-overs during the 12-months of the race to
understand the leadership lessons that the adverse weather, over-whelming
tiredness, close contact and the general unpredictability of life at sea wrought
on the teams. West's report identifies three key behaviours that made a real
difference to the performance of the teams:
Alignment - the ability to meet multiple expectations and draw people together in pursuit of
common objectives;
Capability - the ability to develop clear and consistent processes that reduce friction and
uncertainty and enable people to work and learn together;
Autonomy - the ability to build trust and give people the discretion to organise themselves
appropriately within a broad framework.
West observed that "when these three behaviours were applied in relation to
each other, teams were inspired to put in an 'awesome effort'. When they
were over or under-developed teams experienced 'friction', which impaired
their overall agility and slowed them down and led to 'fraction' or teams-within-
teams.”
Authors
Millar, Roddy
West, Trudi
Institutions
Ashridge Business School
Source
Developing Leaders
Idea conceived
November 2013
Idea posted
January 2014
DOI number
Subject
Leadership
Team Building and Teamwork
Before distilling these three behaviours, West had identified eight challenges
that were often highlighted by interviewees, and intriguingly they were not the
technical or endurance ones of the actual sailing but related to interactions
with the other crew members:
Managing expectations
Developing good communication processes
Achieving consistent integration
Approach ('adaptable adjustment')
Sustaining focus and enthusiasm
Support (more for skippers than crew to avoid 'loneliness at the top')
Sleep (a challenge increasingly recognised in businesses too)
Trust
Ashridge researchers developed a 'Winning Behaviours Model', drawing on
the behaviours of alignment, capability and autonomy to create a three-
dimensional axis, where individuals’ relative strengths can be plotted to
indicate their potential to impact outcomes in achieving goals. They believe
this model can have universality beyond the context in which it was created
and “has the potential in an organizational situation to predict outcomes by
positioning an individual or a team on each of the three axes of the cube.”
It is also interesting to note that the crews in the Clipper Race were different
to most teams, as they were neither employees nor volunteers they had paid
to be there, so to an extent were customers too. Clearly this alters the
dynamic subtly but effectively with comparison to the ‘standard’ team. The
crew was a more generic ‘stakeholder’. West relates their relationship with the
leader/skipper in terms of various leadership models in her report and sees
the most appropriate model as Pigeau and McCann’s 2002
reconceptualisation of ‘command and control’; their CAR Model around three
observations of what a modern commander requires to operate successfully:
Competence : physical, intellectual, emotional and interpersonal capabilities;
Authority: the degree of power to act with the resources available;
Responsibility: the degree to which an individual accepts legal and moral liability.
They suggest these capabilities should be developed in relation to each other
as, for example, responsibility without authority leads to ineffectual command
whereas authority without responsibility results in dangerous command.
Business Application
Team leaders should consider applying the three dimensional ‘alignment,
capability and autonomy’ model to assess their own teams and to understand
the dynamics that account for individual capability, and team capability as well
as the capacity of leaders to develop capability in others.
The Ashridge research and the CAR Model highlight the limitations in the type
of leadership that rests on formal authority and explicit responsibility.
Team leaders should bear in mind that factors influencing their own behaviour
and their ability to influence others rest, as West suggests, “more powerfully
within personal authority and intrinsic responsibility, such as our own drive to
achieve what is important to us as well as what is important to others, with
their tacit consent. From here, it takes less energy to develop alignment, build
capability and support autonomy.”
Further Reading
Alignment, Capability, Autonomy: Leadership Challenges at the Clipper
Round the World Race. Roddy Millar (based on conversations with Trudi
West). Developing Leaders Issue 13 (2013).
The full report ‘The Challenge of Leading: Insights from the Clipper
The full report ‘The Challenge of Leading: Insights from the Clipper
Round the World Yacht Race, June 2013’ can be obtained from from
Rebecca Coatswith, Research Coordinator, Ashridge Business School.
Her email address is: [email protected].
Further Relevant Resources
Roddy Millar's profile at IEDP
Trudi West's profile at Ashridge Business School
© Copyright IEDP Ideas for Leaders 2014
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