Abstract
Boards are teams, sharing the common goal of value creation and being collectively responsible for the company they supervise. This chapter explores what it takes for teams to become performing, or, on the contrary, lose their previous performance edge. To make this point very vivid and grasp it better, this chapter provides a detailed account of a tragedy that occurred on Everest in 1996 and that involved three mountaineering teams led by business owners that were running businesses, albeit small ones. The story helps the reader spot similar issues on their boards, thus avoiding their boards meeting similar tragic ends. Ways to combat these biases are explored, including how good processes engender and support effective teamwork.
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Notes
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For a good discussion of group performance we refer the reader to Chap. 10. Working Groups: Performance and Decision Making, in: Principles of Social Psychology—1st International Edition, by Charles Stangor et al., B.C. Open Textbook Collection, 2011.
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This is a brief description to the fundamental decision process that will be presented and further explored in Chap. 12.
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The words are very revealing here. The French, describing kingly tradition, “take” a decision (among those presented by the king’s advisors), whereas the Americans rather “make” a decision, the leader being all powerful and enlightened, leaving the followers “to just execute”—unless the verb actually connotes the fact that the followers literally “make” the decision issued by their leader (we do not think so).
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Charlan J Nemeth and Brendan Nemeth-Brown, Better than Individuals? The Potential Benefits of Dissent and Diversity for Group Creativity, Chapter 4 in: Group Creativity: Innovation through Collaboration, Paul B. Paulus and Beranrd Nijstad, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2003.
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This model, referred to as the OVRxRPxI model, is a refinement by Alain Goudsmet and Ludo Van der Heyden of the GRPI model first presented by Richard Beckhard, in his article “Optimizing Team Building Effort” that appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Business 1(3), 23–32, 1972, and further applied and popularized by Noel Tichy, for example in his book The Leadership Engine: Building Leaders at Every Level, by P. Pritchett, N.M. TIchy, and E. Cohen, Pritchett & Hull Associates, Inc, 1998. See Alain Goudsmet and Ludo Van der Heyden, “The 6 Dimensions of Winning Teams,” INSEAD Working Paper, 2023.
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George T. Doran, “There’s a S.M.A.R.T way to write management’s goals and objectives,” Management Review 70(11): 35–36, 1981.
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James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday, 2004.
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We learned about this scale from Alain Goudsmet, founder of the Mentally Fit Institute in Brussels, former sports coach of the Belgian Tennis and Hockey Federations, and now applying sports techniques to executives and board members (https://mentallyfit.global/en/about-mentally-fit/).
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Massa, M., Taraporevala, K., Van der Heyden, L. (2023). Biases in Action and How High-Performance Teams Address Them. In: Value Creation for Owners and Directors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19726-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19726-0_11
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