The class poll asked for six characteristics of effective leadership and returned a word cloud of 111 distinct terms. Plotted here in full, then re-cut against the five basic conditions the course actually teaches.
Even the best leader on the planet can't make a team do well. All anyone can do is increase the likelihood that a team will be great by putting into place five conditions.J. Richard Hackman, interviewed by Diane Coutu · "Why Teams Don't Work", Harvard Business Review, May 2009 · Session 1 required readingHackman allows personal qualities a limited role. He credits emotional maturity as what lets a leader set a direction at all, his one prescription for making a team special is to exploit your own strengths instead of copying anyone's style, and the five conditions are introduced as things "leaders of companies and other organizations must fulfill". His point is narrower and harder than a trait-versus-condition split: no leader, however good, can make a team perform, so a list of qualities describes the leader, while the five conditions describe what a leader must create. Sorting the 111 answers against the conditions shows how many terms match each condition and how many match none.
He also rules out the exercise the poll was running:
Don't try to ape any leadership model or team, because there's no one right style for leading a team.
Limitations. The photograph was taken at an angle, so the slide rendered as a trapezoid. Fitting the four edges puts the right side nearer the camera, with its edge 1268 pixels against 1078 on the left, a magnification of 1.18 across the slide. That is smaller than the narrowest gap between one size tier and the next, which is 1.39, so the distortion cannot move a word across a tier boundary. The tiers below were read from a perspective-corrected version of the photograph.
Poll Everywhere sizes each word by how many people submitted it, so word size is the only frequency signal the slide preserves. The photograph resolves four size tiers, indexed here to the largest term where communication = 100. Words inside a tier render at the same size, so the order within each tier is alphabetical. Switch the arrangement to see the same terms sorted into Hackman's five conditions.
Two vocabularies the course teaches. Each family below was matched as a case-insensitive substring against all 111 terms, so the search is wider than the words it found. The stems searched are printed in full so the result can be checked.
Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning.Hackman, same interview · the concept has no representative anywhere in the 111 terms
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