J. Richard Hackman (–2013)

Big problems – the kind that societies face – often require an approach like Aesop’s fable. A bunch of blindfolded folks touch different parts of an elephant and describe them to each other. No one can make sense about what the reality is because they’re all describing different things like a tail, a trunk, a belly, or a foot. It’s only when they combine their descriptions into a consistent framework that they can gather that it’s an elephant.

To achieve this insight, though, show more people have to collaborate in a constructive way. When people seem to bicker or pontificate endlessly like on TV, how can we get there? Collaboration expert J. Richard Hackman shows us how to design teams to address hard problems like these by analyzing teamwork in the intelligence community (e.g., CIA, FBI, etc.).

Though this book’s specific use case consists of intelligence professionals, Hackman’s lessons of teamwork far surpass this one instance. “Intelligence professionals” could just be a stand-in name for a community of informed people. The scholar Hackman cuts to the heart of helpful collaboration through this specific field of high stakes and high impact. I don’t work in the intelligence community, but I found plenty of applications to my work life. His six core principles can be applied to almost any team situation.

His main insight is that a team’s design has an incredible influence over its outcomes. To him, leadership is not something that’s built through charisma – something we all seem to want more of – but rather through arranging circumstances to enhance that chances of a team’s success. When a team encounters problems, he suggests that we look not at individual teammates, nor at a supreme individual leader, but at a team’s design.

Anyone looking to take part in their team’s shared leadership should heed this book. It’s not just for intelligence professionals, and it’s not just for titular leaders either. It’s for people who want to usher in a more effective team that accomplishes a task together through information exchange. Although we Americans like to think of ourselves as self-reliant individuals, much of our impact comes via community efforts. Succeeding at these efforts requires effective teamwork that this book shines a light on how to create. show less

Books on leadership continue to fill bookstores’ bookshelves. Most more or less peddle the same message: Exhibit these characteristics as a leader, and your team will perform great. The problem then becomes how to attain a leadership position. However, life and business usually don’t follow such a simple cause-and-effect pattern. A simple set of postulates cannot control team performance, as if it were a geometry problem. And individual leaders alone do not shape a team; its entire show more membership do. J. Richard Hackman advances such thoughts as he contends that everyone bears the leadership’s responsibility to set the conditions for great team performance. Great performance is never guaranteed, but its probability for success can be increased by creating the right culture.

I write this review as the book has been around 22 years. The idea that organizational culture drives success has since been well tested and supported in many settings ranging from sports teams to academic units. Though not a leadership expert, I haven’t found many instances where a healthy culture hasn’t significantly increased success rates. Thus, I assert that this book has become a classic and its contributions have already become internalized by organizational leadership gurus. In fact, my biggest criticism of this book is that its lessons have been so widely absorbed that it doesn’t contribute much new in 2024. That’s a nice problem to have.

Hackman has two basic theses. First, good leaders can come from anywhere, not just from the top down. Second, good leadership attends to team direction, structure, support, and coaching. Good leadership alone cannot secure success, but bad leadership can quickly dampen and destroy even the strongest team efforts. He also explores the cost of good leadership: Good leaders can create a productive, self-reliant team to the point where they can work themselves out of a job. The team might no longer need them.

Hackman’s basic approach grows out of the concept of a leader as a teacher instead of a leader as a puppeteer. His perspective heavily supports empowering knowledge workers to leverage their maximal efforts to benefit the organization. It correlates conceptually with an educated workforce, but I could see where it might struggle with more menial workforce sectors. Again, so much of this thought is now business orthodoxy that I would have liked to have read it in 2002 when it first came out. Presumably, its suppositions were more compelling and impactful then. Still, it’s great to study a classic whose structure remains foundational for today’s successful environments. show less