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.

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​Reflecting on the extraordinary journey we undertook while writing Great Business Teams:

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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!

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Becoming Great

Our book introduces the Team Development Wheel, outlining four stages of a team’s progress:

• Stage 1: Infighting

• Stage 2: Testing Authority

• Stage 3: Questioning Performance

• 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.

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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.

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Great Business Teams is your guide to building effective, aligned, and high-performing teams that deliver outstanding results in any business environment.

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Buy the Book

Hardcopy and digital formats available: