Bryant, I made the point that of 22 teams, with and without leaders, there
was no correlation between success and presence or absence of leadership.
This may not square with your experience, but it is mine, and all 22 teams
are in the same environment. It would be hard to identify the _different_
external forces leading to success or failure. Most of us believe that
the causes of failure had nothing to do with the presence or absence of
leadership, but with specific individual team members, or with unclear
goals -- goals generated by the teams themselves.
In essence I am disagreeing with you that the absence of an appointed
leader is a critical success factor. If there is an official team leader,
it must be a person that is not only annointed by the larger
organization's leadership, but is also recognized as the "natural" leader
by the team. It is most often a leader who subscribes to the following
model: "leaders who lead best are those who are not noticed to be
leading."
--Rol Fessenden
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>