Fakafekauaga and the High-Performing Collective

By Falahemotu Makapatama and Makapatama Founders and Leveki – Guardians and Stewards of Fakafekauaga-Servantship, FakaFekauaga Catalyst (FFC).

Part One of The High-Performing Collective series

Develop the collective.

Organisations have invested heavily in understanding what makes teams perform well. Leadership programmes, management development, team-building, coaching, culture initiatives and performance systems all reflect a legitimate concern with how people can work together more effectively. Much of that investment has produced valuable knowledge and practice. Yet there remains an interesting tension between the outcome organisations seek and where development is often concentrated. High performance is ultimately something a group of people must produce together, while considerable responsibility for creating the conditions for it continues to sit with the person who leads or manages them.

We explored this tension in our earlier article, Beyond Individual Leadership: Developing the Collective through Fakafekauaga. There, we questioned the tendency to develop individual leaders and managers and then ask them to create something fundamentally collective: engaged workplaces, collaborative cultures, resilient organisations and high-performing teams. We also considered what can happen when capability, purpose and responsibility become concentrated around particular positions.

That earlier reflection opened a larger question that deserves more attention. If the outcome we seek is collective, what might change if the collective itself became a more deliberate focus of development?

Fakafekauaga offers a distinctive place from which to consider this question because its understanding of collective capability does not begin with contemporary organisational theory. It begins with the village.

The village and the collective

Long before the language of high-performing teams entered management literature, villages depended upon people being able to live, work and respond together. Their wellbeing and continuity could not rest upon the exceptional performance of one person. Different people carried different knowledge, abilities, responsibilities and roles, and what each person carried existed within a larger web of relationships upon which the collective depended.

This is important because collective life does not require everybody to become the same. Nor does it require everyone to hold the same authority, possess the same knowledge or contribute in identical ways. Elders may carry knowledge and responsibilities accumulated through experience and inherited across generations. Particular circumstances may require the knowledge or capability of someone else to come forward. People learn from one another, contribute according to what they carry and, over time, become responsible for sustaining and passing on what they themselves have received.

The significance lies in the relationship between those contributions. A village does not become capable simply because it contains capable individuals. Its ability to thrive depends upon how people's knowledge, responsibilities and contributions connect with what others carry and with what the collective needs. The wellbeing of the whole is therefore not external to the individual. People are participants in it.

This is already present in our earlier writing on Fakafekauaga, where we described the village as a place in which people belonged to something larger and carried responsibilities within it, with knowledge observed, shared, practised and passed between generations. We were careful then, as we should be now, not to romanticise village life. Villages have tensions, hierarchies and challenges of their own. The point is not to transplant the village into the contemporary workplace. It is to recognise the knowledge about collective life that resides within it.

For Fakafekauaga, this matters profoundly. When we think about developing a collective, we are therefore considering more than another technique for creating a better team. We are beginning from an understanding of human beings as relational: people who carry knowledge, values, responsibilities and potential that become meaningful through their relationships with others and through what they collectively serve.

From individual capability to collective capability

Individual development remains important within this understanding. Fakafekauaga does not diminish the individual in order to elevate the collective. People should have opportunities to develop their knowledge, judgement, confidence, technical expertise and capacity to contribute. The distinction is that individual capability is understood within a wider set of relationships rather than as the final measure of organisational capability.

This becomes particularly important when we consider how organisations think about leadership. A capable manager can influence a team enormously. They can provide clarity, exercise judgement, coordinate work, support people, challenge poor practice and create conditions in which others are better able to contribute. Leadership therefore remains important within Fakafekauaga. What changes is the assumption that the capability of the collective should principally reside with, or be generated by, the person occupying the leadership position.

There is an interesting convergence here with a long history of research into teams. Katzenbach and Smith (1993), for example, argued that the essence of a team lies in shared commitment and that effective teams develop purpose, performance goals and mutual accountability that are held collectively rather than existing only through the formal leader. Their work remains influential because it locates an important part of team performance within the commitments people develop towards their shared work and towards one another.

More than a decade later, Kozlowski and Ilgen's (2006) extensive review of team-effectiveness research offered a more developed systems perspective. They described teams as complex, dynamic systems that develop as members interact over time, with effectiveness emerging through the ways people combine knowledge, skills and effort in response to collective demands. Their review also identified a range of cognitive, motivational and behavioural processes through which team capability develops, including shared knowledge, collective learning, cohesion, efficacy, coordination and adaptation.

This is useful for the argument we are making, but it is important to be clear about the relationship between these bodies of knowledge. Organisational research does not validate the village knowledge from which Fakafekauaga emerges. They arise through different histories and different ways of understanding human organisation. What interests us is the conversation between them. Contemporary organisational science increasingly understands teams as systems whose capability emerges through interaction; village life has long required people to understand, through lived experience, that collective wellbeing depends upon how different contributions are connected.

That conversation becomes particularly interesting when we consider the relationship between individual capability and what a group ultimately becomes capable of doing together.

Capability between people

A group containing highly capable people does not automatically become a highly capable collective. The knowledge, intelligence and technical expertise that individuals bring are clearly important, but they do not tell us everything about what will happen when those people need to combine their capabilities.

Research into collective intelligence provides a useful illustration. Woolley and colleagues (2010) studied 699 people working in small groups across a variety of tasks and found evidence of a general collective intelligence factor associated with how well groups performed. Importantly, this factor was not strongly correlated with either the average or the maximum individual intelligence of group members. Instead, group performance was also associated with relational characteristics, including social sensitivity and greater equality in conversational turn-taking.

The study should not be stretched beyond what it demonstrates, and collective intelligence is only one dimension of collective capability. Nevertheless, it reinforces an important distinction: knowing how capable the individuals are does not necessarily tell us how capable they will become together.

For Fakafekauaga, this is a useful point of connection with the village. The village does not become capable simply by assembling capable individuals. Its strength is also found in what happens between people: whether knowledge can move, whether contributions are recognised, whether people understand their responsibilities towards one another, and whether they can respond collectively when circumstances require something different from them.

The question for organisations, then, is not simply how much capability exists within each person. It is also what capability exists between and across the people who must work together.

What people carry

The Five Core Human Characteristics of Fakafekauaga give greater depth to what collective capability can mean. Matutakiaga, Mahuiga, Fakalofa, Fakamokoi and Matohiaga are not a competency framework for high performance, and their significance should not be reduced to organisational outcomes. They express a deeper understanding of how human beings exist in relationship and the responsibilities that arise from those relationships.

Matutakiaga draws attention to interconnectedness and to our capacity to understand ourselves as participants in wider systems of relationship. Within a team, this can make visible something that organisational structures sometimes obscure: individual responsibilities may be separated on a chart, but the work itself is often connected. A decision made by one person can alter what becomes possible for another; information held in one part of a collective can affect the judgement available elsewhere; the consequences of an action can travel well beyond the person who initiated it.

Mahuiga recognises what people carry in knowledge, values, culture, ancestry and lived experience. A collective contains more knowledge than that which is formally recognised through position, qualification or professional status. This does not make all knowledge interchangeable, but it asks us to become more attentive to what different people know and to the circumstances in which that knowledge may matter.

Fakalofa brings love, compassion and care into the way people recognise and relate to one another, while Fakamokoi reminds us that relationships carry reciprocity. People contribute to a collective, but a collective also has responsibilities towards those whose energy, knowledge and commitment sustain it. These characteristics should not be instrumentalised as techniques for extracting greater performance. Their significance lies first in the quality of human relationship itself.

Matohiaga extends this relational understanding across time. The people occupying an organisation or team today are temporary participants in something that may have existed before them and may need to continue after them. They inherit knowledge, relationships, decisions and consequences, and their own actions shape what others will eventually inherit. This places collective capability within a longer horizon than the immediate performance period.

Taken together, these characteristics allow us to see people as carrying different but interconnected forms of value within the collective. This is where the village foundation becomes particularly important. A thriving collective needs difference. It needs people who carry particular expertise, experience, responsibilities, perspectives and ways of contributing. Its strength lies partly in whether those differences can be brought into relationship with one another and with what the collective exists to serve.

There is a useful point of connection here with Edmondson's (1999) research on psychological safety and team learning. Her study of 51 work teams found that psychological safety—a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—was associated with team learning behaviour, and that learning behaviour mediated its relationship with team performance. Her findings also pointed to the combined importance of team structures, leader coaching and shared beliefs in shaping team outcomes.

Fakalofa should not be translated into psychological safety, nor should Mahuiga be reduced to a mechanism for extracting otherwise hidden knowledge. The concepts have different foundations and meanings. What Edmondson's research helps illuminate is the organisational significance of the relational environment in which people are being asked to contribute. Having knowledge distributed across a collective is of limited value if the relationships within that collective make it difficult for people to speak, question, learn or bring what they know into the work.

What the collective serves

The same relational understanding applies to purpose. In many organisations, considerable attention is rightly given to articulating purpose, strategy and direction. Fakafekauaga adds another dimension by inviting people to explore service collectively through five questions: Why do we serve? Who do we serve? What do we serve? When do we serve? How do we serve?

These questions do not replace organisational purpose statements, strategic plans or performance expectations. Their value lies in creating space for people to explore what those things mean in relationship to one another. A group may understand its objectives without ever having discussed who its members believe ultimately benefits from the work. People can agree about what needs to be delivered while holding quite different understandings of why it matters. A team can be aligned operationally while remaining relatively unfamiliar with the values, knowledge and experiences shaping how its members understand their responsibilities.

When people explore these questions together, purpose has an opportunity to become something more deeply understood across the collective. People hear what their colleagues see, what matters to them, whose interests they believe are affected and what responsibilities they understand themselves to carry. Agreement cannot be assumed, nor should it necessarily be the objective of every conversation. Difference can itself be valuable when it reveals assumptions that would otherwise remain invisible.

This connects with Katzenbach and Smith's emphasis on a purpose that team members can own, but Fakafekauaga takes the inquiry somewhere different.  It asks people to consider purpose through service: who and what their work serves, why that service matters, how it should be carried and what responsibilities follow from it. Purpose is therefore understood through relationship rather than principally as an organisational statement to which people are expected to align.

For organisations, the implications are worth considering. If people understand what the collective serves, recognise how their responsibilities intersect and appreciate what others carry, some of the capability required for collective performance begins to exist within the relationships of the group rather than being concentrated in the person responsible for managing it.

Leadership within the collective

This does not make leadership incidental. Leaders influence priorities, resources, decisions, expectations and the conditions within which people work. What Fakafekauaga asks us to reconsider is whether responsibility for the collective should become synonymous with the formal leadership role.

Research into shared leadership offers another useful conversation here. Wang, Waldman and Zhang's (2014) meta-analysis of 42 independent samples found a positive relationship between shared leadership and team effectiveness, with the relationship particularly evident for team attitudes, behavioural processes and emergent team states. The study also found that shared leadership contributed uniquely to team performance when considered alongside vertical leadership.

Fakafekauaga is not a model of shared leadership, and describing it as such would diminish the philosophy. Its starting point is service and collective responsibility rather than the distribution of leadership behaviours as an organisational technique. Yet the research provides further reason to question the assumption that all of the leadership capability relevant to team effectiveness must flow vertically from one formal leader.

Within the village foundation of Fakafekauaga, people carry different responsibilities and different knowledge. Circumstances can alter whose contribution is most needed. Leadership remains a function that someone may need to exercise, sometimes with significant formal authority, but the wellbeing of the collective is not therefore transferred entirely to that person.

For Fakafekauaga, the aspiration is not to make everyone a leader. It is to develop people who understand that they carry responsibility for the collective and for what it serves.

Rethinking high performance

All of this asks us to examine more carefully what we mean when we describe a team as high performing. Performance matters because collectives exist to serve purposes that require action and results. A philosophy of servantship cannot be indifferent to whether people are capable of fulfilling the responsibilities they carry. Yet performance viewed through Fakafekauaga sits within a wider understanding of relationship, reciprocity and stewardship.

A team can produce exceptional results while becoming heavily dependent upon a few individuals. It can meet demanding targets while depleting the people responsible for achieving them. Strong short-term performance can coexist with weak knowledge transfer, fragile relationships or limited capacity to continue when circumstances change. The measures may tell us that the team has performed highly during a particular period while telling us considerably less about the condition of the collective through which those results were produced.

The established literature itself provides reason to think beyond immediate output. Kozlowski and Ilgen's review treats team effectiveness as encompassing performance alongside the meeting of team-member needs and the continuing viability of the team, while emphasising that team processes and capabilities develop over time.  Fakafekauaga extends the horizon further by bringing questions of service, reciprocity and intergenerational stewardship into consideration.

This is where we make a deliberate distinction between a team that is performing highly and what we are describing as a high-performing collective.

A high-performing collective, viewed through Fakafekauaga, is capable of fulfilling what it exists to serve while also attending to the relationships through which that work is achieved, the different knowledge and contributions upon which it depends, the reciprocity between the collective and its people, and the capability being stewarded for those who will eventually follow.

This is a proposition arising from Fakafekauaga rather than a claim that Fakafekauaga has been empirically demonstrated to produce higher-performing teams. That distinction matters. The opportunity is to explore and evaluate what happens when organisations approach development from this collective starting point while remaining clear about the knowledge tradition from which the approach emerges.

Developing the collective

There is already good evidence that teams themselves can be developed. Salas and colleagues' (2008) meta-analysis examined 93 effect sizes representing 2,650 teams and found moderate positive relationships between team-training interventions and cognitive, affective, teamwork-process and performance outcomes. Their findings support team training as a viable means of strengthening a range of team outcomes, while also showing that factors such as training content, team stability and team size influence effectiveness.

Again, this evidence does not demonstrate the effectiveness of Fakafekauaga. What it establishes is something narrower but important: there is a substantive empirical basis for treating the team itself as a legitimate site of development rather than assuming that collective capability must principally be generated through individual leaders.

Perhaps the deeper contribution of the village model is the reminder that collective thriving has always required people to understand that they are part of something larger, that what they carry has significance, that the contributions of others matter to them, and that responsibility for the wellbeing and continuity of the collective cannot rest indefinitely with one person.

Applied to contemporary organisations, this changes the developmental horizon. Alongside investing in capable leaders and managers, organisations can consider how they strengthen people's capacity to understand what they serve together, recognise their interdependence, bring different knowledge into relationship and take greater responsibility for the collective of which they are part.

This takes the argument in Beyond Individual Leadership a step further. The earlier article asked whether organisations are developing the collective capability they need or continuing to develop individuals whom they then make responsible for producing it. The village foundation helps us understand why that question matters. Collective capability is not simply individual capability multiplied across more people. Something additional develops through the relationships between people, through their understanding of what they serve, and through the ways their different contributions become connected.

Once we take that proposition seriously, another question follows. If the capability we ultimately seek needs to exist across and between the people who must work together, we need to think carefully about where the developmental experience itself takes place. Developing one person and asking them to return and develop the collective is one pathway. Bringing the people who must perform together into the learning itself is another.

That is where we will continue in Part Two of The High-Performing Collective: Where Does the Learning Reside?

References

In our Niuean oral culture, knowledge has long been gathered through relationship: observing our elders, listening to our matua and tupuna, participating in village life, engaging in talanoa and making meaning from what we experience together.

Fakafekauaga emerges from this living knowledge. It has been shaped through generations of people whose names may never appear in academic references but whose ways of serving, relating, caring, sharing and preparing for those who followed made the philosophy visible in everyday life.

We also acknowledge the many scholars, practitioners and knowledge traditions that continue to challenge individualistic understandings of leadership and management and contribute to thinking about collective, relational, systemic and sustainable forms of human development.

• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

  
  

• Katzenbach, J. R., & Smith, D. K. (1993). The discipline of teams. Harvard Business Review, 71(2), 111–120.

  
  

• Kozlowski, S. W. J., & Ilgen, D. R. (2006). Enhancing the effectiveness of work groups and teams. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7(3), 77–124.

  
  

• Salas, E., DiazGranados, D., Klein, C., Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Goodwin, G. F., & Halpin, S. M. (2008). Does team training improve team performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 50(6), 903–933.

  
  

• Wang, D., Waldman, D. A., & Zhang, Z. (2014). A meta-analysis of shared leadership and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(2), 181–198.

  
  

• Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688.