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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: rebecca.coatswith@ashridge.org.uk.

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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