Style

The 'Style' element of Ecosystem Team management focuses on the different leadership styles that managers can adopt to motivate, guide, and support their teams effectively. The leadership style of a manager can have a significant impact on team performance, engagement, and culture.

The activities are the same as described in the Product Team section, but the scope is wider, encompassing the entire ecosystem.

What's different at ecosystem scope

Three deltas at ecosystem scope:

• Modelling, not defining. A Product Team can write down a culture and apply it locally. The Ecosystem Team's culture is shaped almost entirely by what the senior leadership actually does. Whatever leadership tolerates becomes the floor of the culture; whatever leadership rewards becomes its norm. The senior team's behaviour matters more than any culture document.
• Setting the inter-team interaction style. How Product Teams talk to each other, escalate disagreements, and resolve conflicts is shaped by the Ecosystem Team's style. A Product Team can be generative internally but if the ecosystem above it is pathological, the Product Team's culture will drift to match.
• Cross-product communication norms. The communication channels, cadences, and expectations that span products are owned by the Ecosystem Team. Get them wrong and individual teams pay the cost in meeting overload or missed signals.

1. Generative Culture: Creating a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous learning that fosters innovation and high performance.
2. Decentralised Decision Making: Empowering teams to make decisions autonomously and take ownership of their work.
3. Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled: Ensuring that teams are aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the ecosystem while maintaining autonomy and flexibility in their day-to-day operations.
4. Communication Practices: Establishing clear and effective communication practices that enable transparency, collaboration, and information sharing across the ecosystem.
5. Evangelising the Product: Building enthusiasm and excitement around the ecosystem vision, strategy, and roadmap to inspire and motivate the team.
6. Servant Leadership: Leading by example, serving the needs of the team, and enabling their success.

Anti-Patterns

• Command and Control: Adopting a top-down, authoritarian leadership style that stifles creativity, innovation, and collaboration.
• Micromanagement: Over-managing and closely monitoring team members, undermining trust, autonomy, and motivation.
• Lack of Transparency: Withholding information, feedback, or decisions from the team, leading to confusion, mistrust, and disengagement.