Great Business Teams: What's the Secret?

MT. ARLINGTON, N.J., June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson, L'Oreal,
Mars Incorporated, Novartis Oncology, Pfizer, and Philip Morris USA, among
others, are named companies with "great business teams" by Howard M. Guttman
in Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance (John
Wiley, June 2008).
Guttman's latest book examines the inner workings of several dozen
high-performance senior executive teams, assessing how they react to
significant challenges. He singles out five characteristics that make them
excel.
Guttman comments, "Great business teams abandon old hub-and-spoke thinking
and operate in a high-performance, horizontal mode." He discovered that great
teams radically redefine management fundamentals: everything from assumptions
about what it means to lead and be a player, what behaviors are acceptable,
what accountability entails, what skills are needed, and the criteria for
measuring success.
When Paul Michaels became president of Mars Incorporated, he knew that the
company needed to achieve far greater growth and financial return. But he
faced internal organizational challenges every bit as daunting as those he
faced in the marketplace. The top team at Mars was siloed and replete with
unspoken agendas.
Michaels believed that the horizontal model represented the best bet for
the future. "High-performance, horizontal teams are by far the most efficient
way of operating ... This model can speed up progress by years."
Michaels took his team through an intensive "alignment" session to that
ensure team members operated from the same playbook, became accountable for
one another's-and his-results, and confronted one another on issues. As a
result, team members committed to the horizontal vision, agreed on
decision-making ground rules, called one another on unacceptable behavior, and
eventually moved to adopt a similar approach within their operations. The
goal: a great organization, made up of great teams, on every level.
Guttman found that Michaels and the other executives cited in Great
Business Teams employ a unique "distributive power" leadership model. They
create horizontal playing fields, make teams accountable for results, and then
ask: How much decision-making "room" does a team require to achieve standout
results? Once the preconditions for operating horizontally are in place, power
no longer follows old hierarchies but flows or is "distributed" to meet the
challenges at hand.
For more on Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout
Performance, visit www.greatbusinessteams.com or any bookseller.
SOURCE Market Access

Peter Tobia of Market Access, +1-215-402-0731,pmtma@aol.com