Next Level Leader Blog

For Your Team's Success, Remember the How ... & the What!

  

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Response to HBR article: For Your Team's Success, Remember the How 

Linda and Kent,

Your emphasis on the How in this blog takes one side of the ongoing debate professional managers and experts have been batting around for years. What's more important, content or process, the What or the How. I have taken both sides in the course of my career working with senior leaders as a consultant and as a senior leader.

As a young consultant, I emphasized the How, feeling that most executives bet on expertise when forming must-be-successful teams and in part because I didn't appreciate the content experts as much as I should have. After becoming a senior executive I became more and more frustrated with my consulting colleagues who undervalued expertise and over-estimated the magic of "teamwork" and "collaborative methodologies." Now I find myself encouraging line managers to think more about the process of getting to results and encouraging my consulting colleagues to invest more of their professional development time in business savvy and domain expertise.

I've concluded that if we could get senior executives to invest a bit more in strengthening collaborative processes and get consultants to invest more in knowledge and expertise, we'd have the perfect balance.

I'd love your thoughts on the professional debate. How far do you think collaborative and innovative processes gets a company team and where are the limits? Also, how far does domain expertise (including cross domain expertise) get us, and where are the limits?

I have found that teams comprised of superb communicators who lacked profound knowledge produced A+ esprit de corps but lack luster results, whereas teams with deep knowledge and expertise and a modest amount of collaborative capabilities produced more game-changing results.

Modest process + profound knowledge = potential for game-changing results

Great process + modest knowledge = modest results only.

Has your work taken you deeper into researching this balancing act?

Thanks,

Chris