Leading Teams More Effectively

Like the Marine Corps, modern business and government organizations face new "adapt or die" challenges to performance.® To effectively negotiate increasing globalization, complexity, environmental dynamism, diversity, and technology, the highest performing organizations (Southwest Airlines, Cisco Systems, 5.11 Tactical, University of Maryland Medical Trauma Center, Procter & Gamble Company, Herman Miller, etc.7) have transformed from primarily top-down or centralized command and control structures8 into units of self-managed teams.9 Rather than using rigid, vertical hierarchies of leadership to guide work efforts and achieve objectives, these teams rely on individual team members to exhibit leadership when appropriate based on their knowledge, skills, abilities, experience, and the demands of the situation.10. [...]shared leadership may act as an effective complement to vertical leadership team frameworks within the military when the power (i.e., authority) from the hierarchal structure fails to achieve leadership effectiveness alone.18 Shared leadership in the Marine Corps Shared leadership, supporting mutual influence rooted in the social interactions among team members, has a strong record of significantly improving team and organizational performance, to include change management teams, virtual teams, business consulting teams, trauma center resuscitation teams, new venture top management teams, etc.