Smart Leaders Smarter Teams by Roger Schwarz - Book review

Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams

How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results

By: Roger Schwarz

Published: March 18, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
ISBN-10: 0787988731
ISBN-13: 978-0787988739
Publisher: Jossey-Bass











"This book starts with the assumption that you're probably making some contribution to your team's ineffectiveness in ways you don't see", writes team leadership strategist, organizational psychologist, and president and CEO of Roger Schwarz Associates, Roger Schwarz, in his engaging and practical advice filled book Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results. The author describes the unexpected reason that teams become stuck and fail to reach their fullest potential, and shares proven hands on strategies and techniques for teams to achieve top performance.

Roger Schwarz understands that leaders often face frustration when their teams fail to achieve their desired results. The author provides evidence that the leader is usually causing the team to become stuck and ineffective. Roger Schwarz makes the startling assertion, that the cause of this problem, is leaders hold the mistaken belief that there is one leader in the room. The author even delves more deeply into this obstacle to team effectiveness by offering the answer as one of the leader's mindset. Roger Schwarz calls this roadblock one where leaders have a unilateral control mindset. In this mode of thinking, a leader mistakenly attributes the entire responsibility for guiding all dimensions of the team to a single individual. Roger Schwarz challenges leaders to overcome this mindset and offers the skills and exercises to develop a truly productive mindset.



Roger Schwarz (photo left) recognizes that leaders often lack awareness of their own mindset that is holding back their team. The author also presents the point that in challenging moments, leaders use a different mindset from the one they believe they are using at that time. The leader may uses the unilateral mindset to ensure their own solution is applied to a problem, or that they can't imagine a viable alternative to the unilateral leader concept.Even if a leader is aware that they are utilizing the unilateral leader mindset, they are convinced that it is the proper approach to leading a team effectively to achieve its goals.

Roger Schwarz proposes that leaders change their mindset by discarding the unilateral leader paradigm and adopting some fresh assumptions. Leaders will also have to align systems, policies, and processes in support of these new assumptions. Leaders must openly share and spread to others on the team. At the same time, leaders must build trust across all relationships within the team. To cover all aspects of the change in leadership and strengthening of teams, Roger Schwarz utilized the following overarching structure in the book:

* How well does your team really work?
* How you and your team got stuck: The unilateral control approach
* Getting unstuck to get results: The mutual learning approach
* Getting the puzzle pieces on the table: Mutual learning behaviors 1-4
* Putting the puzzle together: Mutual learning behaviors 5-8
* Designing for mutual learning
* Dealing with common team challenges
* becoming a smarter leader
* Becoming a smarter team

For me, the power of the book is how Roger Schwarz combines a comprehensive overview of why teams fail to achieve their full potential, with a complete strategic and tactical approach to transforming the leader and the team into an effective group. The author demonstrates why standard leadership thinking, in the form of the unilateral leader mindset, is the cause of the group getting stuck and being unable to move forward.

Roger Schwarz not only presents the alternative perspective of mutual learning behaviors and how to incorporate them into the leader's viewpoint, but how to build teams that work together effectively. The author stresses that leadership resides in the entire team, and with every member of the team. This change in thinking liberates the leader and the team to implement the five core values of transparency, curiosity, accountability, informed choice, and compassion. The result is a more effective team that achieves outstanding performance and reaches and even exceeds the loftiest goals.

I highly recommend the team building and leadership transforming book Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams: How You and Your Team Get Unstuck to Get Results by Roger Schwarz, to any leaders who find themselves and their teams stuck and unable to move forward to achieve their goals. This book guides leaders toward instilling leadership into the entire team and all of its members, and establishing outstanding performance.