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The Leadership Team
Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas? by Stephen A. Miles and Michael D. Watkins
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 The Leadership Team: Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas? 10 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
Reprint R0704F
This article is made available to you with compliments of Stephen A. Miles. Further posting, copying or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org.
The Leadership Team
Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas?
The Idea in Brief
The best executive teams exploit their members’ distinctive strengths. For instance, diskdrive giant Seagate’s leaders—the CEO, COO, and executive VPs of finance and marketing/ strategy—excel together by drawing on their complementary functional expertise. Yet complementarity’s benefits don’t come free, say Miles and Watkins. For example, team members’ differing perspectives may keep them from committing to a common strategy. How can leadership teams reap complementarity’s benefits while avoiding its risks? Erect four pillars of alignment: shared vision, rewards for achieving common goals, constant communication, and trust that each team member has the firm’s best interests at heart. Also, ensure smooth leadership transitions; for instance, help the COO prepare for the CEO role by giving him increasing responsibility for setting strategy. The payoff? A leadership team that collectively delivers far better results than each member could provide on his own.
The Idea in Practice
Miles and Watkins offer these suggestions for benefiting from team complementarity: UNDERSTAND COMPLEMENTARITY’S DIMENSIONS Leadership teams are most effective when members play complementary roles along
The Leadership Team
Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas? by Stephen A. Miles and Michael D. Watkins
Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 The Leadership Team: Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas? 10 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications
Reprint R0704F
This article is made available to you with compliments of Stephen A. Miles. Further posting, copying or distributing is copyright infringement. To order more copies go to www.hbr.org.
The Leadership Team
Complementary Strengths or Conflicting Agendas?
The Idea in Brief
The best executive teams exploit their members’ distinctive strengths. For instance, diskdrive giant Seagate’s leaders—the CEO, COO, and executive VPs of finance and marketing/ strategy—excel together by drawing on their complementary functional expertise. Yet complementarity’s benefits don’t come free, say Miles and Watkins. For example, team members’ differing perspectives may keep them from committing to a common strategy. How can leadership teams reap complementarity’s benefits while avoiding its risks? Erect four pillars of alignment: shared vision, rewards for achieving common goals, constant communication, and trust that each team member has the firm’s best interests at heart. Also, ensure smooth leadership transitions; for instance, help the COO prepare for the CEO role by giving him increasing responsibility for setting strategy. The payoff? A leadership team that collectively delivers far better results than each member could provide on his own.
The Idea in Practice
Miles and Watkins offer these suggestions for benefiting from team complementarity: UNDERSTAND COMPLEMENTARITY’S DIMENSIONS Leadership teams are most effective when members play complementary roles along