Fleenor Review of 3D Team Leadership by Professor Brad Kirkman

Brad Kirman, head of the Department of Management, Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Poole College of Management, and Professor Brad Harris of TCU published “3D Team Leadership” in 2017 that discusses the challenges in team leadership in real-world organizations. The book was recently reviewed by John Fleenor, a senior researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership, who delved into the book’s discussion of leadership processes and hardships. The review is as follows: 

As anyone who is interested in teams and teamwork knows, there are a plethora of new books on this topic on the market at any single point in time. The typical offerings on teams, however, inevitably seem to espouse outdated and timeworn principles with content and examples that are trite, predictable, and derivative. Many of these works on teams are based entirely on anecdotal evidence with questionable rationales rather than on rigorous research and theory. Contrary to this trend, 3D Team Leadership represents a novel, current, and well-researched approach to the complex challenges of team leadership, which provides accessible, practical examples and descriptions of teams in real world organizations. This book represents an important advance in team research and should be on the reading lists of all leaders, HR professionals, academics, and researchers who lead, support, or study teams in organizations.

3D Team Leadership prescribes a new, thought-provoking model of team leadership that leaders can employ to create, manage, and maintain high-performing teams. Books on teamwork have customarily considered teams to be groups of employees working interdependently and have ignored both individual differences among team members and the subgroups that inevitably form within teams. The framework presented by Kirkman (a professor of leadership in the college of management at North Carolina State University) and Harris (an assistant professor of business at Texas Christian University) focuses on three key dimensions of team leadership (the “3D” of team leadership): the team as a whole, the team as individuals, and the team as consisting of smaller units (subteams). Based on their own and others‘ research and consulting, Kirkman and Harris provide practical guidance and straightforward advice for managing complex teams in today’s business environment, including suggestions on how leaders can evaluate the current level of effectiveness of their own teams.