Jessica:
Your post has brought out the semantic difficulty in this discussion. I
would say that a team "where leadership shifts, depending on the task at
hand" is a team without a leader. Of course every team has people who are
in the fore when accomplishing a particular task. That is the beauty of a
team -- an eclectic collection of talents, expertise, experiences, and
personalities, and a single task will require a certain subset of those to
be working the hardest or the most visibly. But that doesn't create a
hierarchy, in my mind.
The trouble I have with hierarchies is that the limit the individual to a
predefined set of responsibilities, and sometimes (much more often after
the team learns to operate this way) the individual needs to do things
that aren't his regular responsibilities. Traditional hierarchies limit
and the also create the need for bureaucracy. They stifle creativity and
they hinder "ownership" of a project by the individual.
J.B.
>I'm wondering if you mean that these teams have no traditional
>hierarchical *authority* leaders. In my experience, all teams have
>leaders, usually multiple ones, based on expertise, experience, and a
>variety of other "leadership" traits. I've never seen a team without any
>"leaders" at all.
>
>And, I'd posit that the best teams are those where leadership shifts,
>depending on the task at hand.
>
>Jessica
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