ARTICLE | October 01, 2024
October 2024, Volume 1, Issue 7
Bake’s Takes: A KHA Management Consulting Recommended Reads by Jonny Baker, Strategic Consulting Partner.
Hot Take: “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” – C.S. Lewis
As a leader you need exposure to varying perspectives, insights, and ideas.
This month’s Top 3:
The Discipline of Teams, Katzenbach and Smith
- Article on how we often mislabel working groups as teams. It talks about how ideal teams range from 2-4 in number with clear mission, focus, and measurables. Each member must bring equal engagement and be assessed for technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills.
- It also discusses the type of teams needed for different objectives such as teams that recommend things, teams that make or do things, and teams that run things.
“Nonetheless, real teams at the top of large, complex organizations are still few and far between. Far too many groups at the top of large corporations needlessly constrain themselves from achieving real team levels of performance because they assume that all direct reports must be on the team, that team goals must be identical to corporate goals, that the team members’ positions rather than skills determine their respective roles, that a team must be a team all the time, and that the team leader is above doing real work.”
How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight, Eisenhardt, Kahwajy, Bourgeois
- This article is critical for management teams. If healthy conflict cannot happen, organizations, and their stakeholders, fail. To get to the point of having a good fight, there must be high trust and confidence amongst the team.
- In those environments described in the favorite line above, team members worked with more, rather than less, information and debated facts, developed multiple alternatives to enrich debate, shared goals, used humor in the process, maintained a balanced power structure, and resolved issues without forced consensus.
- Side bar: This is not fairy tale and it can be done, as foreign as this may seem, we have seen management teams we have worked with get to this point.
“The teams with minimal interpersonal conflict were able to separate substantive issues from those based on personalities. They managed to disagree over questions of strategic significance and still get along with one another.”
Who Has the D?: How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance, Rogers and Blenko
- Interesting article that introduced the “RAPID” method (in functional order: Recommend, Agree, Input, Decide, Perform) to decision making, clarifying every role in the process and who distinctly sits in each letter. It is likely if decisions are hard to come by or get to in your organization, the roles are unclear or conflicted.
- The article shows some quite comical independent surveys done where two distinct groups were asked who has decision making authority in particular singular areas: low and behold, with a maximum criteria score of 100%, one result was 147% and the other 138%.
“Here, as elsewhere, someone needs to think objectively about where value is created and assign decision roles accordingly.”
Why Bake’s Takes: I have been accused by friends, colleagues, and clients of pelting people with articles and book recommendations. Some of my mentees have stacks of books they will never get through (some of my mentors too). As such, I have decided to curate a monthly summary that holds what I deem to be the 3 best articles or reads of the month (when I read them, not published that month). I do love Harvard Business Review and you will see much of it as my work is focused on equipping leaders for the tough tasks ahead of creating vision, alignment, and execution. I have yet to find a better resource for equipping that work well.
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