Avoiding Hub-and-Spoke Leadership
Recently, a friend told me that I really needed to watch The Bear on Hulu—partly because of the food element, partly because of leadership, and partly because the second season refers to former USA men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s book Leading with the Heart. It’s basically a trifecta of my interests.
This passage from Coach K’s book is descriptive of what I’ve seen in many teams: “Visualize a wagon wheel as a complete team. A leader might be the hub of the wheel at the center. Now suppose the spokes are the connecting relationships the leader is building with people on the outer rim of the wheel.”
In meetings, for example, this approach often manifests in a dynamic of sequential sharing—one person talks to the team leader, with everyone else silent. Then the next person speaks, and so on. It’s a “team meeting,” but it could just as well be office hours with the professor, with each student waiting their turn.
This dynamic typically works well for the leader, but if you ask others, they wouldn’t say it’s a terribly good use of their time.There’s also a good chance they wouldn’t say the conversation helped them learn about everyone else’s work.
The hub-and-spoke model is also a brittle one. As Coach K writes, “If the hub is removed, then the entire wheel collapses. In a situation like that, if a team loses the leader, the entire team collapses. [...] I've learned this lesson the hard way. A framework of leadership has to be created so that the wheel is sustained if something happens to the hub. You do that by developing trusting relationships among everyone.”
Before he was a basketball coach, Krzyzewski was a cadet at West Point (and captain of the basketball team), and then an officer in the Army. So it’s not a surprise that he developed this framework for team resilience—it’s an important concept in military leadership.
He writes: “The team has to succeed—even if the leader is incapacitated or injured or out for some reason. And when all members have an appreciation for the aspects of every other job on the team, the team survives and continues.”