Leading as a team

This article deals with the difficulty of creating a “leadership team.” Increasingly, organizations are finding it unworkable for a single almighty leader at the top to understand the full complexity of the business, build consensus throughout the business, and call all the shots. Instead, many are arranging for the leadership function to be performed by teams, perhaps of two equals, perhaps of whole, cross‐functional committees. The problem is that, while the idea is excellent in principle, very few companies have actually succeeded in creating effective leadership teams. In this article, the author describes that problem and addresses it with an approach to building leadership teams. Importantly, the approach recognizes and integrates elements of leadership teamwork that can be engineered and elements that must be cultivated and grown over time, and is well positioned in terms of the current scholarship on leadership development and team‐building.