A Team of Leaders

How can every person on your team—not just the manager—become a genuine leader? In A Team of Leaders, Paul Gustavson and Stewart Liff argue that anyone can be developed into a leader when the environment is designed to make leadership the norm, not the exception. They contend that most organizations unintentionally suppress initiative, ownership, and accountability by clinging to outdated structures where one supervisor directs a group of compliant workers. Their core message is bold: if you want performance breakthroughs, design your workplace to turn everyone into a leader.

In this comprehensive guide, Gustavson and Liff introduce a practical model for transforming teams from dependent followers to self-managed units that deliver extraordinary results. Drawing on decades of organizational design, engineering, and public-sector leadership, they unveil the Five-Stage Team Development Model that takes teams from leader-driven to fully self-managed. Alongside this, they present frameworks for design, process improvement, value creation, knowledge management, and visual management—the mechanisms that support transformation.

Why Redesign Team Leadership?

The authors begin with a candid look at the problems facing supervisors and employees. Traditional hierarchies leave managers overwhelmed, workers disengaged, and teams underperforming. When managers must control every detail, they exhaust themselves trying to motivate people who lack ownership. The authors liken this to a system that produces followers by design. To break free of this trap, they advocate an approach where the team itself develops the skills, mindset, and systems to lead collectively.

Gustavson and Liff note the irony that many companies pour billions into leadership training without realizing their structures actively prevent leadership. Meetings, metrics, and management systems often reinforce dependency rather than initiative. Their insight echoes Peter Senge’s concept of the learning organization: people cannot think like leaders within systems built to make them followers.

The Five-Stage Journey to Self-Management

Central to the book is the Five-Stage Team Development Model, influenced by Carl Bramlette Jr. and Abe Raab’s research. Stage One teams are hierarchical; the supervisor makes all decisions. At Stage Five, teams self-manage—members set goals, share accountability, and continuously improve performance. The manager becomes a coach and strategic advisor, not a controller. The authors describe this evolution vividly through stories: General Electric’s Durham jet-engine plant, where one manager leads over three hundred self-directed employees, and the VA’s New York Regional Office, which transformed into autonomous, high-performing teams recognized nationally for innovation.

Both examples illustrate how teams can “own the entire engine” or “own the claim,” taking responsibility from start to finish. When workers no longer wait for orders, they find meaning in their work and pride in results. The authors emphasize that reaching Stage Five doesn’t happen overnight—it’s a gradual cultural and systems redesign that can take years, much like losing weight after years of unhealthy habits.

Designing for Leadership

The authors argue that leadership must be engineered into the workplace. “Teams are perfectly designed to get the results they get,” Gustavson writes. To build leaders, every system—goals, structures, rewards, and technology—must align with that purpose. Through their Organization Systems Design (OSD) Model, they teach how to align strategy, structure, culture, and outcomes. This practical model bridges lofty leadership ideals with concrete design steps: conduct environmental scans, analyze process flow, redesign structures, and align reward systems to reinforce teamwork instead of siloed performance.

If your results disappoint, “look at your design,” the authors insist. They show how even well-intentioned organizations sabotage teamwork—for instance, a company that rewarded productivity over quality despite declaring quality its top priority. When policies misalign with values, trust erodes. Alignment isn’t cosmetic; it’s systemic engineering that integrates culture with business systems.

Why Everyone Gains from Leadership

Beyond productivity, the human benefits are profound. Gustavson begins with a personal story: his father’s happiness at work dictated the mood of their home. When work was meaningful, the family thrived; when it wasn’t, tension spread. Today, Gallup’s data shows that only 30% of employees are engaged—proof that the workplace affects not just business outcomes but personal lives. A team of leaders, the authors suggest, transforms not only companies but communities and families.

The journey culminates in empowerment: team members design their own goals, measure their own progress, and mentor each other. Supervisors reclaim their time for strategic work and coaching. The culture shifts from compliance to enthusiasm, from dependence to initiative. It’s not a utopian ideal—it’s a tested method grounded in measurable results across industries as diverse as manufacturing, government, and sports.

What You’ll Learn

Throughout the following key ideas, you’ll explore the essential pillars of this transformation: how to use the Five-Stage Model to empower every member; how to design and align systems for advantage; how to manage processes that reinforce leadership; how to quantify team value creation; how to build and disseminate knowledge as the team’s greatest asset; and how to visually design your space to reinforce performance and pride. By the end, you’ll grasp a powerful truth—leadership isn’t a title but a design choice. When design, culture, and systems align, everyone becomes a leader and no one feels like just another cog in the wheel.

At the heart of the book lies the Five-Stage Team Development Model, a roadmap showing how teams evolve from dependency to collective leadership. Gustavson and Liff use vivid examples—from football teams to manufacturing plants—to prove that any group can move through predictable stages toward self-management.

Stage One: Directive Dependence

At this initial stage, team members depend entirely on the leader for direction. Interaction occurs mostly one-on-one, resembling a pipeline of orders. Members receive assignments and follow instructions. The supervisor owns accountability and drives performance alone. The authors describe a distribution team where, when a coworker repeatedly arrived late, members agreed it was the supervisor’s job to fix it—classic Stage One behavior.

Stage Two: Beginning Interaction

Here the journey begins. Team members start to interact with one another, discuss goals, and propose solutions, though still under strong manager coordination. Supervisors coach and coordinate as frustration and uncertainty emerge. The team resembles a “toddler”—learning to walk but still clinging to the leader’s hand. In Phyllis’s Global Service Center team, she does most of the tutoring and coordination, while members barely start helping each other. Progress is slow, but signs of teamwork emerge.

Stage Three: Shared Beginnings

Leadership begins to spread. A few individuals step up to lead small tasks and meetings. Knowledge starts to circulate, and members start seeing the bigger picture. Frustration persists, but empowerment grows. For instance, Dan in finance leads his first meeting and helps handle outliers while learning from his manager’s mentorship. He recognizes, “Not all aspects of stepping up are fun,” revealing the natural growing pains of developing leadership muscles.

Stage Four: Nearing Autonomy

Most team members now lead in at least one area. Communication improves; the team sets and tracks its own goals, and the supervisor becomes a counselor and coach. This phase brings high engagement but lingering need for guidance, especially on conflict resolution. In the book’s example, George’s facilities team leads critical work activities and manages vendor relationships yet remains reliant on periodic coaching—“still close but not quite there.”

Stage Five: Everyone a Leader

At this stage, the team self-manages entirely. All members participate in setting stretch goals, benchmarking, and mentoring other teams. Performance standards are high; mediocrity isn’t tolerated. The authors describe Barbara’s distribution leadership team that scans the environment for global best practices and exceeds high targets while its manager focuses on cross-functional strategy. Members act as full leaders—a mature adult team owning its destiny.

From Workers to Leaders

The practical takeaway: teams evolve predictably, much like human development—from infancy to adulthood. Supervisors must guide this evolution through coaching, delegation, and structured mentorship. Progress depends on maturity, knowledge diffusion, complexity, and fluidity. (Note: The authors compare it to weight control—it takes time and consistent systems to sustain transformation.) Once all systems reinforce shared leadership, teams reach a state of high energy, accountability, and innovation. The leader becomes peripheral, focusing on strategy while team members lead themselves.

Gustavson’s mantra—“Teams are perfectly designed to get the results they get”—frames a critical truth: poor performance usually reflects poor design, not lazy people. Chapter 2, “Secrets of Great Design,” reveals how to build systems that align structure, purpose, and culture so leadership becomes natural.

Understanding Alignment

In the Organization Systems Design (OSD) Model, teams exist within an environment, respond to pressures, and generate outcomes based on their structural and cultural design. Every element—mission, processes, rewards, and information—must align. Misalignment sabotages success. One case describes managers preaching “quality” but rewarding only productivity. When workers saw bonuses tied to volume instead of precision, trust collapsed. The lesson: alignment is moral, not cosmetic. It signals integrity between words and actions.

Design Choices

The authors divide design choices into strategy (mission, principles, uniqueness, metrics) and systems (processes, structure, decision-making, people, rewards, renewal). Each must support the organizational purpose. For example, if “customer satisfaction” defines the mission, the reward system must compensate teamwork, quality, and trust-building—not just output speed.

Design guidelines include measuring outcomes in five categories—customer, stakeholder (financial), community, operational excellence, and workforce voice. These indicators link team metrics to enterprise results. (This mirrors approaches in The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton.)

Process and Culture Analysis

The authors teach practical diagnostic tools: environmental scans to study external forces; process mapping to visualize inefficiencies; culture analyses to examine communication networks. In one energy company case study, managers discovered their reward system encouraged competition among employees instead of collaboration—undoing team-building efforts. Revising the system realigned incentives toward shared success.

Another example shows how office design itself influences teamwork. When partitions block employees’ view of each other, cooperation declines. Lowering barriers literally and metaphorically transforms a workforce from isolation to connection.

From Design to Transition

Redesigning for leadership takes planning. The book outlines five transition plans: management, action, stakeholder commitment, evaluation, and stabilization. These plans address change fatigue and resistance. The authors recommend transparency—invite skeptics to design teams so they take ownership. When people co-create systems, they commit emotionally. The outcome is not abstract alignment but living architecture that teaches everyone to think and act like leaders.

In Chapter 3, “Teams Have Processes, Too,” the authors emphasize that leadership isn’t just interpersonal—it’s embedded in process design. Every team, whether a bakery or an engineering unit, operates through repetitive processes that can either empower people or keep them dependent. Understanding these flows turns management from supervision into system thinking.

Mapping Core Work

Teams must visualize their work through state changes—the step-by-step transformation of an input into an output. A bakery, for instance, converts raw ingredients into a finished product through sequential state changes. When teams map these transitions, they see where waste, errors, and inefficiencies occur. A large corporation saved $500 million merely by reviewing handoff points between departments.

Managing Performance Together

High-performing teams manage not only group targets but individual accountability transparently. The book encourages posting team metrics and personal anonymized results—turning performance into shared learning instead of private judgment. In one rehabilitation team, members stopped blaming each other by integrating every step’s result into everyone’s standard. Collaboration replaced finger-pointing; rehabilitation rates soared.

Selecting and Onboarding Leaders

Hiring is reframed as developing future leaders. The authors list guiding principles like self-selection, behavior-based evaluation, and realistic job previews. New hires join through energetic orientation sessions featuring mentors and visible mission displays—because first impressions set expectations for leadership. (This recalls the onboarding emphasis in The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins.)

Building Capability and Off-Boarding

Capability building includes aligning individual development plans (IDPs) with team skill gaps using a skills matrix. Departures—voluntary or involuntary—become learning opportunities. Knowledge is transferred through SOPs and exit interviews so institutional memory endures. Leaders handle underperformance decisively but compassionately, guided by clear processes and HR partnership. The principle of “addition by subtraction” reminds teams that retaining toxic members drains collective energy.

When processes—from hiring to exits—align with the leadership vision, teams work like self-regulating organisms. Management’s role shifts from enforcing rules to improving systems. The payoff: high accountability and a constant pipeline of developing leaders.

Chapter 4 introduces the Team Value Creation Model, teaching teams to think like entrepreneurs. Inspired by Jack Stack’s The Great Game of Business, Gustavson and Liff show how teams convert their work into measurable value by understanding both costs and contributions. When team members see their financial impact, engagement transforms from compliance to stewardship.

From Costs to Value

Each team operates as a mini-business. Members learn to calculate total costs—salaries, benefits, overhead—and compare them to the market value of their output. In one section’s model, a ten-person team tracked cost per transaction, discovering variations among members and opportunities to streamline work. The transparency motivated performers and enabled peer coaching for those below benchmarks. The result: tangible profit growth and morale boosts.

Creating a Game Worth Playing

The authors turn economics into motivation. When teams track daily value creation, work becomes a game—people know what winning looks like. As Jack Stack argues, employees thrive when they understand the rules, see real-time results, and have something to gain or lose. The value model fosters continuous problem-solving discussions: how can we improve workflow, reduce downtime, or raise customer value?

Practical Application

Gustavson and Liff provide detailed templates with columns for wages, overhead, transactions, and net value created (positive or negative). This level of transparency makes economic literacy part of leadership development. One company cut its cost per financial transaction from $230 to $95, beating industry standards, after benchmarking and empowering teams to analyze and redesign processes themselves.

The Human Side: Whole-Brain Thinking

While numbers matter, the authors warn against reducing leadership to spreadsheets. They advocate a whole-brained approach—combining analytical left-brain logic with right-brain purpose and emotional connection. When people understand how their work creates both financial value and human impact, they work with passion. This balance between metrics and meaning sustains Stage Five teams across industries.

Knowledge is the engine of leadership. In Chapter 5, the authors argue that to build leaders, you must manage not just what people know but how knowledge flows. High-performing teams treat learning as a shared system, not a one-time program.

Four Types of Knowledge

Teams possess four types of knowledge: codifiable know-that (facts), codifiable know-how (procedures), tacit know-that (attitudes and beliefs), and tacit know-how (expertise and artistry). Codifiable knowledge fits manuals; tacit knowledge, like intuition or “feel for the game,” comes from experience. Gustavson compares it to mastering tennis or golf: you memorize the steps, but excellence flows from instinct built through repetition and reflection.

Discovery and Diffusion

Teams tend to excel at discovering new information but struggle to diffuse it. The book quantifies learning capability as KC = D x D (Discovery × Diffusion). If discovery scores high but diffusion low, overall learning stagnates. Raising diffusion exponentially increases team capability. In practical terms, sharing tacit wisdom—how to handle clients, debug issues, or resolve conflicts—multiplies performance far faster than new discoveries alone.

Tools for Knowledge Management

The authors introduce tools like the Knowledge Assessment (cataloguing domains and learning methods), the Skills Matrix (mapping competencies), and the Voice of the Team survey (measuring how strongly members exhibit desired behaviors). They recommend environments that encourage renewal and unlearning outdated methods—Google’s 10% innovation time or Hallmark’s “teach one new thing” are model practices.

Institutionalizing knowledge management means making learning visible: documenting lessons, mentoring newcomers, and revisiting skills at regular intervals. Tacit knowledge cannot be commanded—it must be cultivated through trust and collaboration. When people learn together, networks deepen and capability compounds.

The Outcome

Ultimately, managing knowledge transforms teams into learning organisms. Leaders are made, not born, through structured retention and diffusion of insight. Once this becomes part of daily routine, learning ceases to be external training—it becomes the team’s DNA. Teams that master this are not just informed—they are adaptable and future-ready.

In the final section, the authors unveil Visual Management—an innovative concept merging performance management with fine art. Stewart Liff’s experience transforming the VA’s Los Angeles Regional Office into a visually driven workspace shows how environment shapes emotion, culture, and ultimately leadership.

Seeing is Believing

Liff observed that dull, lifeless offices bred cynicism and apathy. By redesigning the physical space with inspiring photographs, performance dashboards, and artifacts like helicopters and cannons honoring veterans, he turned the workplace into a living museum. Results were staggering: a 50% improvement in grant rates, massive customer satisfaction gains, and a culture of pride. Visual cues grounded abstract goals in emotional engagement.

The Whole-Brain Connection

Visual Management taps all senses—sight, sound, color, even music—to connect logically and emotionally. Drawing on Ned Herrmann’s Whole Brain Thinking, the approach uses graphs for analytical minds and imagery for intuitive ones. Emotional experience, music, and metaphor become tools for long-term memory and sustained leadership behavior.

Practical Implementation

Teams implement visual management through phases: planning, building a framework, creating the space, focusing on data and customers, celebrating employees, and renewing displays. It’s not decoration—it’s strategic design. Environments display purpose, metrics, and achievements so that every employee “feels, sees, hears, and touches” the mission. When implemented, visitors and staff alike sense momentum and excellence.

Expanding Impact

Bronco Mendenhall applied similar principles at Brigham Young University’s football program, turning blank walls into motivational spaces that honored service and athletic legacy. The result: transformed morale and consistent winning seasons after years of losses. Visual management proved adaptable—from government to sports and education—because it builds identity and reinforces values daily.

By aligning physical space with cultural aspiration, teams sustain Stage Five performance. As the authors conclude, when you surround people with reminders of their mission, achievements, and value, they no longer just work—they lead.