Two Kinds of Teams - Shared Leader and Single Leader

Should team task assignments be controlled by a project manager, or should each team member create and accept tasks? You can get a big increase in performance if you know when to use each of these methods of organization.

A client wrote: “my plan was to have them work separately first and then after they passed the one week test to have the ones we like work together. Is this not possible? I think we have a fundamental difference on the idea of a “team. Your model is a self-organizing group of people who work on the same code. My model is a group of people who work towards the same goal by writing individual components while making sure all the components interface correctly.”

I wrote back:

You might be interested in this: The Discipline of Teams.

A friend of mine, Doug Smith, wrote a series of books starting with “The Wisdom of Teams” and “The Discipline of Teams” in which he looked at how teams are managed. He believes that there are two different management structures.

1) One is the “team”, which is a group of people that self organizes in the sense that they pick their own tasks, and any one of them can lead the effort if needed. A team can form if people have a strong sense of a shared goal.

2) The other structure is the “single leader group”, in which a group leader figures out who should do what task at what time. That’s a classic management structure that can work even if the shared goal isn’t clear to everyone.

According to Doug, there are specific circumstances when you would choose a “single leader group” versus a “team”. I can see you making this type of decision at Grazr. Your work with Kurt is part of a team. Your work with the new guys is single-leader.

I liked these ideas, learned from them, and invited Doug to be on the board of directors at PowerSteering Software, where we hoped to implement tools for both methodologies. I’m a big supporter of the single-leader methodology when a leader is in place to make it work, and I use it myself when working with new guys.