Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice

17

WHAT MAKES TEAMS OF LEADERS LEADABLE?

Ruth Wageman and J. Richard Hackman

SOME SEVENTY years ago, telecommunications executive Chester Barnard (1938) wrote The Functions of the Executive, a classic book explaining what senior leaders must do to help their organizations succeed. The core idea is in the second word of the title: that leadership is a matter of seeing to it that certain necessary functions—establishing direction, creating structures and systems, engaging external resources—are fulfilled so that members can accomplish shared purposes. Barnard demonstrates that getting people to collaborate to pursue collective objectives depends on getting those general functions accomplished.

Some two decades later, Joseph McGrath (1962) picked ...