Leaderless Teams

Why are people commenting about "leaderless teams" as if the article defines that to mean, "A team where there is no leader present"? That's not what this article is about at all. I know it's "bad form" to accuse people of having not read the submission, but folks come on, go read the actual submission!

The article can be summed up by this line:

> What emerged from this exercise is that social class, education, gender and athletic ability were less important for leadership than the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group.

So it's about how the best leaders are those who attend to the others in the group to create psychological safety so that those others can thrive without emotional risk.

The article also talks about how people seem to have forgotten this core concept but they haven't; it was the key conclusion to Google's own research into its most successful teams as well.[0]

If your team isn't primarily focused on providing psychological safety, then your leaders need to read Google's findings ASAP...

[0] https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

I didn't find much of interest in the article, but I realized that we have the concept of "leaderless teams" in the company where I work.

The company produces several distinct but related products. All of the products have a shared set of concerns and resources. They are all built upon the same in-house operating system, they all use the same development and testing lab infrastructure, they all have UIs, automated testing, etc. Migration of CIs between teams (generally voluntary) is relatively common.

To avoid duplication of work and to coordinate work and improvements on these shared resources, "guilds" spontaneously formed. Guild members more or less represent their own team's interests while also contributing to guild efforts as a whole, if they can, and when they have the time. Each guild has semi-regular meetings. There is usually a guild "leader" but this person is more of a secretary in the sense that they only schedule meetings, take notes, and facilitate communication. Guild leaders are just CIs like everyone else in the guild and have no actual authority to direct work.

Company management is aware of guilds and will allocate resources to them if specifically requested but otherwise have no involvement in the guilds and never attend meetings. Guilds (along with non-asshat managers) are one of the things this company has that I wish was more commonplace in tech companies.

I have experienced leaderless teams in my career (46 years) a handful of times. They formed around a problem that was unrecognized by Management (thankfully) but need to be solved. My best example was at a large SW dev firm in the late 80s. World wide electronic communications was need and faxes and leased lines connected to Decwriters were not good enough. I was assigned to the task as just one of my responsibility. A Single 1200 baud access to internet email at a university solved the problem. The problem expanded many people wanted the same service so we need someone (team member 2) who had access to a UNIX systems. Eight serial ports and 2400 internet connection to the first local ISP.

Rinse repeat 5 years later 10 people, part time, supported all internet connections and intranet/internet web-servers including application without management sanction. Everyone had a service role in there own department. Being connected to the others meant we performed at a high level. We didn't have a leader per se but we all moved in a common direction.

It lasted 8 years and finally several Directors discovered we existed as a team. Like sharks they each took a bite out of us, each one trying to become the dictator of the internet. Procedures were imposed. We were not allow to speak to each other with out going through the directors. Our individual productivity dropped. Angry internal clients screaming for the old way. Nothing got done. Three months later the director that won got half the people back together but we were not the same any more. I still found interesting work for 2 more years before finally leaving.

Leaderless teams can work under the right conditions. I have tried to create them when I moved into management and it worked to some degree a few times. I did not lead or participate in the teams I just suggested people talk to each other know that the might click. I fed them problems (and resources) that I knew that they could solve that I knew would take more effort/time if we did it though channels. The individuals got recognition and I got my problems solved.

This is an empty, hollow article and its not like how I experienced groups for 20+ years.

Just like with siblings in families or groups of friends, everyone naturally gets a role in a group; that's just how groups of people let alone animals work. Need to learn how to help others is fine and dandy, until it affects your own autonomy, let alone your identity, let alone the groups' autonomy. Than it will eat at you.

Also what happens in groups is that if there is someone thats is truely not fit for a group, the whole group dynamic will change for the worse and it will try to oust it like a cancer. Until there is someone that speaks up (a leader) things will stay the same because the group will value the "being a group" above all else, even the goal of which the group was founded on.

So? You actually need a good natural leader to guide you through some of the bad stuff. I think leaders are often misunderstood of being only authoritarian, but thats not the case.

> What emerged from this exercise is that social class, education, gender and athletic ability were less important for leadership than the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group.

So, not actually leaderless teams, but a self-organizing structure from which emerged a role that is easily mapped to leadership, though not called that by name?

That we incorrectly define leadership, and attach a lot of ideas to it that have nothing to do with leadership itself, should be obvious to anybody who has worked inside a badly run organization. And it's a trivial observation that doesn't get us any closer to forming better teams.

I used to think I wanted to work in a completely flat organization, with nobody who thought they could boss me around. Having done that, I now realize what I actually want is someone who is good at being the boss, and isn't a prick about it. I want somebody to have a synoptic view of what's going on, keep all the parts running smoothly, and act as a shield against all the various distractions coming from outside the team or the company, so I can do my job well. Such people are multipliers for effectiveness and happiness on teams.

What you usually get is someone who has no particular skill in these areas, but likes to have authority, and likes making more money.

I sometimes wonder if the problem isn't that there are only a few actually good leaders in the world, but we need to act like there are 10x or 100x more than that in order for our economy to run. Every once in a while you meet a great one, but the majority of "leaders", from the C level to the PM level, should really be doing something else instead.

How do you solve that problem?

Leaderless models work very well in cases where tasks are stable, tasks can be assigned 1:1 to team members, team members more-or-less understand which tasks are for them, and any major changes to tasks can be coordinated on timeframes of months or years.

The classic example is the traditional academic department at a non-research university.

1. The main deliverable are courses.

2. Each professor has some assigned courses. Once assigned, the professor can teach the course mostly in isolation. Additionally, the department tends to hire faculty in a way that makes sense for their curriculum; ie, the one Systems professor in a small CS department is probably going to be teaching the Systems electives.

3. The courses offered are mostly stable. When the curriculum changes, the changes can be managed in a distributed fashion because the change will take at least 6 months to 18 months before rollout.

Therefore, a traditional academic department can run in a mostly leaderless fashion, with a department chair who plays a supporting role and perhaps a bit of a coaching role for newer hires.

This doesn't work as well when tasks require close collaboration or when tasks evolve rapidly. It's not impossible. Just much harder. In those cases you tend to end up with a recognizable leadership vacuum, leading to sub-optimal outcomes mentioned in other comments.

Anyways, that's all a bit of an aside and not directly germane to the article. But I do wonder if selecting leaders via leaderless teams exercises selects for leaders who work well in well-defined tasks with teams that are already partitioned into quite specific roles, but flail in environments with more dynamic tasks/goals.

Leaderless teams always start to build a hierarchy on its own and the longer they exist the harder it gets to get new people into the group. It's really hard to manage.

To me authority and leadership are related but orthogonal.

Authorities come from the ability to author. It is a creation right. The creation could be a story, a software and, probably what most most people have in mind about authority, a rule. On the other hand, leadership is the ability to, well, lead. You go where ever you want, but if you want people to follow, you need leadership.

One can be a leader without authority. Think of a manager, while it might not be obvious, it is ultimately up to the "managee" to decide whether to carry out what the manager requires. You may fire, you may hire, but none of those guarantee you things getting done. Manager has no authority.

Now, write a software. People wants to add a feature to YOUR software. You have absolute authority in deciding whether to accept.

The article is about how to identify promising leaders via a training exercise. It is not about using leaderless teams for actual work.

Many of the comments here seem to be responding only to the title.

Article is interest, but miss important thing - military at war is very special type of collective, near impossible in civilian collectives.

For example, remember covid-liners cruise ships, appeared on first weeks of pandemic, where it was impossible to get out, but they have all needs satisfied.

This also remember me parts of USSR system, where people moves where limited, but there where no financial crisis, no recession, free food, free apt, for some significant share of people, this is dream life.

Whenever my boss was out on vacation and the subject came up, I just told anyone who asked that the team was in autonomous collective mode.

This is an interesting article. My takeaway is that this British team during the war seems to have streamlined a process for surfacing leadership traits that are relevant in a military context.

Lately, my view on what makes a good leader and what I'm trying to practice myself is simplifying down quite a bit. I've come to the conclusion that if there is one attribute you should optimize for, either for yourself as a potential leader, or in choosing someone to follow when selecting a venture, it's ... technical competence.

Hopefully it's clear that I'm defining technical competence broadly to mean deep knowledge about the details of your particular domain. I think this definition is applicable to engineers, attorneys, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc.

I think generalizable leadership attributes are important but purely supplementary to technical competence.

I've read a lot of material about leadership, but rarely have I read on how to follow, something that is just as hard to do effectively.

I've come to a more complex position, where the task needs to align with the team for them to be leadable. With the right amount of incentives, any group can be pushed to deliver, but those incentives might differ by task (shit work needs different encouragement and support compared to creative work) and sometimes the needed incentives cost more than the end result is worth.

Understanding this alignment between task and team helped me triage how to approach the situation, or if it's even possible with the given people.

This is interesting, but it’s not obvious to me what “the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group” means in this context.

It would be interesting to learn how that capacity was observed and measured. Has anyone seen the source research?

"What emerged from this exercise is that social class, education, gender and athletic ability were less important for leadership than the capacity for an individual to attend to others in the group."

If this experiment was done 80 years and they selected military leadership positions based on this experiment (as it implies by reduced failure rate measure), I don't understand why OP used "gender" in the summary statement above? Did UK actually field troops in WWII led by women?

I feel like I've suffered through this type of "leadership" for the past decade. When it works, it's great (although I feel you've kind of traded traditional authority for slight manipulation/scheming on part of the leader in such instances). These instances have also always involved more experienced team members.

When it doesn't work it's useless. Instead of just getting told to drive straight off a cliff you get to wander around in a forest for a while and when you eventually find out you're lost it's way too late.

As always (and as TFA points out) the person you pick for a leader still needs to actually possess whatever skill set your flavor of the month leadership style requires.

The worst thing is that you end up in interviews and garbage like this is somewhat important. This is at most an opinion that matches poorly to the real world.

Hierarchies are ingrained in our genetic code. Its how most organisations have evolved for hundreds of millions of years starting from crustasians like lobsters. You might not agree politically with Jordan Peterson, but his book 12 rules for Life, is an excellent book and the first chapter talks about how hierarchies are fundamental to any social structure across most organims. There can be some outliers, but if there is no hierarchy to start with, a new hierarchy will most certainly evolve over long periods of time.

This is really a bad strategy for promotion. Attending to others means not doing your own shit, which would compound as you help others more and more. Hence they would all be promoted whist you're on a PIP.

Makes sense though, basically need to balance individual desires and group goals. Helping the newbie get up to speed won't really benefit you, but will mean the team now can do more.