📖 Great Business Teams

Cracking the Code for Standout Performance

2008. Howard M. Guttman

In this book, consultant Guttman offers his take on high performance teams, drawing from “more than twenty-five years of work with major corporations”. His insights are padded with lots of examples from inside companies such as Mars, Johnson & Johnson, and L’Oreal.

Attributes

At the core of the book are what Guttman proposes to be the eight attributes of a high performing team:

1. Clear team goals
2. Right players in place
3. Clear roles/responsibilities
4. Commitment to winning for the business over self-interest
5. Agreed-upon protocols for decision-making and conflict resolution
6. Sense of ownership/accountability for business results
7. Comfort first dealing with conflict
8. Periodic self-assessment

Horizontal

Throughout the book he refers to an organisations need to become a “horizontal organisation”. This doesn’t necessarily mean flat, in the way we use it today, but rather one which endeavours to “breakdown hierarchies, eliminate silos, distribute decision making, and create a sense of ‘we accountability’ throughout the organization”.

Team Development Wheel

He frames the journey to high performance using what he calls the Team Development Wheel, drawing obvious inspiration from Tuckman’s model of group development.

In Stage 1 people avoid conflict and just maintain a facade. In Stage 2 people start getting into the issues but it’s all blame, defensiveness, and finger pointing. In Stage 3 they start clarifying roles and building new ways of working. And in Stage 4 they start demonstrating the eight attributes above. Stage 1 & 2 can evolve naturally, while moving into 3 & 4 requires some intervention from the team members.

Transformation

The last chapter focuses on moving “from great teams to a great organization”. Guttman encourages organisations to stay away from large-scale transformation initiatives, and instead shift your focus on “the molecular level of organizational life”— small, focused teams.

“Transform teams, and business results will follow”.

When you read it all at once, the book starts to feel like a laundry list of aspirational characteristics for teams, for team members, for team leaders, etc. There is also very little research cited to back up the claims made, with Guttman relying almost exclusively on his own theories based off his own observations. Regardless, much of his theories line up well with what are still the prevailing theories today, over ten years later.