Cohesive Leadership Team: Whole Before the Part
Tanmay Vora
After reading my last post about cohesive leadership team, some one asked me, “What exactly is cohesion?” I went on to share the following example.
In a recent game of cricket, the top batsmen failed to make an impact and got out in quick succession. Clearly, the team was facing the risk of scoring the lowest total ever. Then, the captain walks in with a resolve clearly visible on his face. He takes time to settle in the game before steering the team to a defendable total score.
In a team, cohesion is about people having a sense of collective responsibility. If one team member fails, the other alters his/her game to cover up such that the net impact on the end result is minimal. That is cohesion. In a cohesive team, the end goal or outcome assumes higher importance than an individual.
In a cohesive team, no team member can really say, “I have done my part and it was working. This failure is not because of me.”
In an organizational setting, senior leaders have a common and over-arching goal. Tough and tricky decisions have to be made keeping this goal in perspective. Trust has to be established between the team members. Conflicts have to be resolved and commitment has to be generated. Things have to be done, and done in the right direction.
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Bottom line: Cohesion in a team (specially senior leadership team in an organization) is important for success. It is important in a game of cricket and it is important in families. In a system, parts represent the whole. If the whole is fragmented, parts will start moving in different and often, opposite directions.
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Also Read: Cohesive Leadership Team: A Few Questions
Well said. Achieving cohesion is not always an easy task, but an admirable goal. With it, almost all challenges can be handled. Without it, the smallest problem becomes insurmountable.
In the Solar System, it is the larger gravitational pull of Sun that binds each planet to the Solar system, even as each of the planets has its own natural tendency to move away from the System.
In the cases of families or the organizations, this degree of cohesion can best be achieved by trust – for the individual abilities, for the mutual sharing of strengths and shoring up of weaknesses and for the collective commitment to the common goal and values.
The most apt example of a cohesive team the Nature provides us is that of Flight of the Geese. Their ‘structure’ of V formation, intrinsic sense of (common) direction, rotating the leadership role, helping out a colleague in need (without being out of the team) are some of the ’causes’ that develops the trust, and in turn a harmony of cohesive flight.