Books on leadership continue to fill bookstores’ bookshelves. Most more or less peddle the same message: Exhibit these characteristics as a leader, and your team will perform great. The problem then becomes how to attain a leadership position. However, life and business usually don’t follow such a simple cause-and-effect pattern. A simple set of postulates cannot control team performance, as if it were a geometry problem. And individual leaders alone do not shape a team; its entire membership do. J. Richard Hackman advances such thoughts as he contends that everyone bears the leadership’s responsibility to set the conditions for great team performance. Great performance is never guaranteed, but its probability for success can be increased by creating the right culture.
I write this review as the book has been around 22 years. The idea that organizational culture drives success has since been well tested and supported in many settings ranging from sports teams to academic units. Though not a leadership expert, I haven’t found many instances where a healthy culture hasn’t significantly increased success rates. Thus, I assert that this book has become a classic and its contributions have already become internalized by organizational leadership gurus. In fact, my biggest criticism of this book is that its lessons have been so widely absorbed that it doesn’t contribute much new in 2024. That’s a nice problem to have.
Hackman has two basic theses. First, good leaders can come from anywhere, not just from the top down. Second, good leadership attends to team direction, structure, support, and coaching. Good leadership alone cannot secure success, but bad leadership can quickly dampen and destroy even the strongest team efforts. He also explores the cost of good leadership: Good leaders can create a productive, self-reliant team to the point where they can work themselves out of a job. The team might no longer need them.
Hackman’s basic approach grows out of the concept of a leader as a teacher instead of a leader as a puppeteer. His perspective heavily supports empowering knowledge workers to leverage their maximal efforts to benefit the organization. It correlates conceptually with an educated workforce, but I could see where it might struggle with more menial workforce sectors. Again, so much of this thought is now business orthodoxy that I would have liked to have read it in 2002 when it first came out. Presumably, its suppositions were more compelling and impactful then. Still, it’s great to study a classic whose structure remains foundational for today’s successful environments.
Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances
By J. Richard Hackman
Copyright (c) 2002
Harvard Business School Press
ISBN13 9781578513338
Page Count: 312
Genre: Leadership
www.amazon.com