GREAT BUSINESS TEAMS
Cracking the Code for Standout Performance
What Makes Great Business Teams Stand Apart?
Crack the code for standout performance and your team will join the 25 high-performing organizations profiled in Great Business Teams. Howard M. Guttman examines the inner workings of business teams; isolates five key performance drivers; and offers a radically new vision of the emerging horizontal organization and the great teams that are the cornerstone of its success.
"Cracking the Code for Standout Performance" - Unlock the Secrets of Success
About Great Business Teams
In Great Business Teams, renowned business consultant Howard M. Guttman takes you inside some of the world's most successful corporations—Johnson & Johnson; Novartis; Mars, Incorporated, and L'Oréal, to name a few—to discover how a powerful new high-performance, horizonal model has changed the way leaders lead, team members function, challenges are met, and decisions are made. He also reveals how and why the organizations that have implemented this innovative team structure have become great companies, able to ride the crosscurrents during lean times and truly soar when opportunities arise.
Guttman bases his keen insights on more than twenty-five years of work with major corporations. In Great Business Teams, you will meet thirty-nine senior executives from twenty-five standout companies, whom he has interviewed in depth and whose performance he has tracked over time. This hands-on guide delivers all of the insights, techniques, and hard-won wisdom needed to create, operate, and sustain well-run and effective business teams that consistently achieve the highest levels of performance.
The Praise for Great Business Teams
“Great Business Teams provides an excellent guide to companies that would like to embark on a similar high-performance journey."
— Robert J. Gamgort, Executive Chairman, KeurigDrPepper
“In Great Business Teams, Howard Guttman digs deeply into the dynamics of organizational life to discover the 'code' for standout performance, which enables leaders and their teams to achieve significant results now and well into the future."
— President and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum;
Recipient, Presidential Medal of Freedom
“Howard Guttman's book puts into context what it means to actually develop high-performing teams. This is much more than an academic exercise; it gives you practical ways to get started, at all levels of management, today."
— Michael E. Sneed, (retired) EVP Global Corporate Affairs and Chief Communications Officer, Johnson and Johnson
"Every team manager should read and apply these principles. If you want your team to be successful, this is a must read."
— Jean-Daniel Gervais, Amazon reviewer
The Book
In Great Business Teams, renowned business consultant Howard M. Guttman takes you inside some of the world's most successful corporations—such as Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Mars Incorporated, and L'Oréal—to uncover the transformative impact of a high-performance, horizontal organizational model. This groundbreaking approach has redefined how leaders lead, team members collaborate, challenges are addressed, and decisions are made.
Drawing on over 25 years of experience with major corporations, Howard Guttman shares insights gained from working with 39 senior executives from 25 standout companies. Through in-depth interviews and performance tracking, Guttman offers a hands-on guide filled with proven techniques, real-world wisdom, and actionable strategies for creating, operating, and sustaining business teams that consistently deliver exceptional results.
Real-World Success Stories
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At Novartis Oncology, the CEO and his action teams successfully counter a competitor’s new product that was projected to seize 20–30% of market share.
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Mars Incorporated's Latin American Division, after a reorganization, shifted from double-digit losses to double-digit growth in just one year.
These and other compelling examples provide a practical blueprint for achieving success through high-performing teams.
Key Takeaways from the Book
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Learn how to ratchet up team performance and achieve stellar results year after year.
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Become a high-performance leader and inspire others to do the same.
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Align teams to drive consistent, exceptional performance.
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Redefine accountability at both individual and team levels.
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Develop leadership skills across all team members.
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Leverage a new "distributive decision-making" model to improve outcomes.
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Build and sustain great teams throughout your organization.
The Author
Howard M. Guttman is principal of Guttman Development Strategies, Inc. (GDS), a Mount Arlington, NJ-based management consulting firm founded in 1989 and specializing in executive coaching; building horizontal, high-performance teams; strategic and organizational alignment; and management development training.
GDS has been ranked as a top Leadership Development consulting firm by Leadership Excellence magazine, which also named Howard to its list of "Excellence 100 Top Thought Leaders."
Speaking Engagements
Howard is a sought-after speaker on topics such as:
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“Great Business Teams: What Does It Take?”
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“Conflict Management as a Core Leadership Competency”
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“Putting Performance into High-Performance Teams”
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“Executive Coaching: Lessons from the Firing Line”
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“Alignment: Creating High-Performance Teams from the Top Down”
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“Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Through Self-Coaching”
The Back Story
Great Business Teams
Unlock the secrets of success and transform your organization into dynamic, highly motivated teams of top performers, ready to tackle any business challenge with confidence and agility.
Reflecting on the extraordinary journey we undertook while writing Great Business Teams:
The Courage to Share
We interviewed 39 executives for Great Business Teams, and several allowed us to attend their alignments and team meetings. They were remarkably open, honest, and self-critical. It took real courage for them to give us access to their meeting rooms, permission to record the action, and consent to share the results with readers. Truly impressive!
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
By almost any performance metric, the leaders we interviewed are highly successful. Yet, they refuse to rest on their laurels. These leaders are proud of their achievements, but they constantly raise the bar. Ken Bloom, CEO of INTTRA, captured this mindset perfectly: “If you think you are done, you are done.”
Leading, Not Talking
There’s plenty of talk these days about “flat” organizations, “engagement,” and “empowerment.” What sets these 39 leaders apart is their bias for action. They ask themselves: “What do I need to do to take my team from good to great?” Then they act decisively. By leading through action, they redefine leadership and followership while transforming their organizations, team by team.
Force for Change
Change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Frustration is often the spark. Many of the leaders we studied experienced a big-bang, enough-is-enough moment. Scott Edmonds, CEO of Chico’s, described it this way: “As Chico’s grew more complex, we began to operate in silos... I felt as though, if it didn’t change, they wouldn’t be able to pay me enough to put up with it. Life is too short to be a referee or a dad trying to keep peace among all the siblings in the family.”
Feedback Pushback
While many leaders are comfortable giving feedback, fewer are skilled at receiving it. For many of our 39 leaders, learning to embrace feedback was a struggle. Helen McCluskey shared: “My toughest challenge was learning how to deal with negative feedback. At the beginning, I took it well on the outside but then overanalyzed, dwelled on it, catastrophized it. I had to learn to lighten up.” My takeaway? Inner struggles build high-performance muscle.
Becoming Great
Our book introduces the Team Development Wheel, outlining four stages of a team’s progress:
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Stage 1: Infighting
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Stage 2: Testing Authority
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Stage 3: Questioning Performance
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Stage 4: High Performance
Most teams remain stuck between the first two stages. Breaking free often requires the guidance of an external coach or advisor. Achieving Stage 4 greatness demands a profound transformation—rethinking leadership and player roles, redefining acceptable behaviors, embracing accountability, acquiring new skills, and adopting new criteria for measuring success.
Power Revisited
Power is one of the most charged concepts in management. For the leaders of great business teams, it’s value-neutral—not glorified, as Alpha Leaders might do, nor dismissed, as Servant Leaders often do. Great leaders level the playing field, align teams starting at the top, and make them accountable for results. They then ask: “How much decision-making space does the team need to achieve standout results?”
Once the conditions for high-performance, horizontal teams are established, power flows—not along traditional hierarchies, but in a distributed manner to meet challenges effectively.
Great Business Teams is your guide to building effective, aligned, and high-performing teams that deliver outstanding results in any business environment.
Buy the Book
Hardcopy and digital formats available:
Table Of Contents
Preface ….............................................................................................. ix
Acknowledgments ........................................................................… xi
Chapter 1: Cracking the High-Performance Code …............. 1
Chapter 2: The New High-Performance Leader .................… 19
Chapter 3: The New High-Performance Player ..................… 47
Chapter 4: Aligning for High Performance ...........................… 79
Chapter 5: Accelerating to High Performance ...................… 111
Chapter 6: How Great Teams Make Decisions ..................… 125
Chapter 7: How Great Teams Manage Meetings ….............. 141
Chapter 8: How Great Teams Communicate .....................… 155
Chapter 9: From Great Teams to a Great Organization ..… 169
Chapter 10: Great Leaders and Teams:
Challenges, Responses, and Remaining Issues …................ 185
Appendix A: Player-Centered Leadership ….............................. 203
Appendix B: The Skills of a Great Team Member ..............… 209
Index ….................................................................................................. 231
