When you take on a new role, do you like adding some familiar faces to your team? It seems logical. We want to surround ourselves with a few people we trust and can depend on when we move into a new position. We hope that having some trusted lieutenants on the team will lead to faster, more impactful action. We may encounter some key risks, though, when we build our team in this fashion. Morag Barrett, a leadership development expert, has written a terrific article for Fast Company about how leaders should (and should not) build their teams.
Barrett argues that inner and outer circles may form on the team. In academic terms, we describe this type of situation as a "fault line" between subgroups, and that type of fracture can harm team performance a great deal. Barrett writes, "Leaders who 'go way back' share shorthand, context, and trust earned elsewhere. Others, often equally capable with deep institutional knowledge, find themselves outside that orbit."
She goes on to give an example of one CEO with whom she worked. She writes, "I coached a CEO who’d brought three former colleagues into a 10-person executive team. Within months, critical decisions were being pre-discussed among “The Four” before formal meetings. The other six leaders became increasingly passive, not because they lacked capability, but because challenging pre-baked decisions felt politically risky."
I've seen this type of situation as well. If team members outside the inner circle feel as though decisions are being presented at staff meetings as a fait accompli, then buy-in and commitment will decline precipitously. Motivation and decision implementation will suffer. We can bring trusted colleagues onto our team, but we need to work hard to integrate these members with the others in the group. We can't let people feel as though there is a huge status gap between two subgroups.
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