Top Teams and Team Parameters
The two special challenges of top teams with regard to the guiding process team parameters are either:
• The aspect of a ‘community of fate’ comes into the foreground more than with other teams. Often it can be observed that for the governing bodies the question of how the respective people could function as a team does not play a very great role in the occupation of managers. This is pre-supposed. This is how top team members come together in a group with very different professional backgrounds, who have had different career paths and for whom much is at stake. At stake, because the contract periods are short and the renewal is not self-understood. The fear of ‘dropping out’ is often hidden or denied and is, therefore, all the more effective. In team dynamics, this aspect is an important reason for establishing solidarity in relationships, because otherwise the dysfunctional anxiety processes will subtly hinder the team in its performance and leadership abilities.
or else:
• an impressive and all-determining focussing (and dependence) upon the chairman of the management team develops, because only he can decide about remaining or being dismissed. Such ‘princely’ sole rulers create, intentionally or unintentionally, very much more anxiety than is generally believed. The phenomenon of anticipatory obedience (even with top team members) escalates. The risk for the organisation with such a constellation is massive, as correction instances and correction dialogues are missing for the powerful (and as he, as a rule, sees things quite differently). Usually, authoritarian leaders underestimate the amount of adaptation in the environment enormously.
It follows that it is anything but self-understood that a top team will find its way to a functional shaping of team parameters; firstly, because it is not customary to discuss the phenomena mentioned above, and secondly, because, even if one wishes to do so, it is not easy for anyone to do so.