The Cone Model for Teams' Support Network - Shy Alter

This resource first appeared in issue #117 on 09 Apr 2022 and has tags Managing A Team: Other

The Cone Model for Teams’ Support Network - Shy Alter

As managers and leaders we develop, and are responsible for, a team, not a list of individuals. A team is a group of people that support each other and hold each other accountable, not just a set of people with similar email addresses who report up to the same manager.

And yet an awful lot of management training and writing focuses solely on interactions between the manager and each individual team member. That’s vitally important, and an excellent place to start. You have to get the basics of being a manager right before focussing on strengthening teams. When I’m talking to new managers I often bring up Google’s Project Oxygen, which focussed on basic manager skills, first - but they followed that up with Project Aristotle, which was about higher performing teams as a whole. They found five key determiners of high performing teams:

• Psychological safety - team members feel comfortable to take risks, raise sensitive points, and try new things
• Dependability - peers reliably complete quality work on time
• Structure and clarity - expectations are clear
• Meaning - the work as a whole is meaningful to the team members
• Impact - team members can see their contribution

For almost all of these, the within-team dynamics play as big a role as the team member-manager dynamics.

Here the alter makes the point that even from a technical point of view, you can’t meet all your team needs, If you uncover needs for your team members in one-on-ones and then look for coaching and mentoring opportunities between team members, you’re now developing your team in two ways: building their coaching/mentoring skills and their technical skills.

The nice thing about this of course is as the team grows, the amount of time you can spend on each team member drops as 1/N, but the amount of time available for other team members to spend on each other stays almost constant as (N-1)/N…

And there’s no reason why peer-to-peer coaching, mentoring, and teaching has to be constrained to within one team. Have you seen (or do you have) good peer knowledge-sharing and coaching setups? Anything you want to share with other readers? Let us know!