Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jon R. Katzenbach for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
* * *
But today, with the ever-increasing necessity of working across organizational and geographical boundaries, and the growing complexity of daily business, more leaders at all levels are finding that it’s not always practical — or even best — to put together a team. Fortunately, we now have more options; in particular, consider the potential of focused networks, and sub-groups that can work more effectively in different modes than “real team.” For example, even when I was engaged in my earlier writing on teams, I didn’t really recognize that what looked like a team was in some cases actually a set of networks and sub-units.
What’s the difference? A team is a small group with a leader (leadership can and does shift among the members in a real team), accountable for a specific and compelling performance purpose; it typically has a beginning and an end. In contrast, a network is a larger, informal, loosely defined group of people with various types of expertise, who can weigh in to solve different types of problems. In some situations a focused network is more flexible and inclusive than a small team. For instance, in 1993, Doug Smith and I wrote about Burlington Northern Railroad, where a team of seven created a multibillion-dollar business in “piggybacking” rail services (loading truck containers onto flatbed rail cars), despite major internal resistance.
I’ve since recognized that it wasn’t just the team of seven; they were drawing on a powerful internal network of around 50 people throughout the company who weren’t formally involved, but whose informal participation allowed the team to tap a broad range of expertise and aggressively push through a new business model. The team of seven had no skilled marketers, for instance, and success would require marketing insights, which ultimately came through people outside the team.
Networks can also support and enhance sub-teaming among senior leadership groups — which increases both the capacity and flexibility of the larger group. Most executives find their day jobs pretty all-consuming, so they can seldom afford to act as full-time team members. They can, however, come together to define a purpose, and then go off and execute with help from their networks.
Jon R. Katzenbach is a senior partner at Booz & Company and leads The Katzenbach Center at Booz, where promising new approaches in leadership, culture and organization performance are developed for client application. His consulting career has been largely focused in these areas and spans several decades across three different professional books, including Wisdom of Teams, Peak Performance and Why Pride Matters More Than Money. He received his MBA from Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. Jon is a founding partner of Katzenbach Partners. To E-mail him, please click here.