Leadership Team Alignment - by Frédéric Godart & Jacques Neatby (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Leadership Team Alignment provides evidence-based strategy and solutions from two authors who bring a wealth of practical experience buttressed by an in-depth knowledge of the most recent leadership team research. This work is based on over eight hundred hours of direct observation of over fifty leadership teams on different continents, and thousands more hours working with their executives assessing team challenges and implementing solutions to address them. Global companies examined in depth span the financial services, gaming, health, media, construction, transport, hospitality, aerospace, and chemicals industries. The result is a targeted strategy for building and managing a top executive team to gain competitive advantage. The book debunks much of the received wisdom regarding the sources of leadership team dysfunctionality and explains why commonly adopted remedies end up doing more harm than good. Distinct and empirically driven, this work is the needed action plan for creating alignment from the leadership team and across organizations to maximize performance"--

Book Synopsis

Debunking much of the received wisdom regarding the sources of leadership team dysfunctionality, Leadership Team Alignment presents a targeted strategy for building and managing a top executive team to gain competitive advantage. Frédéric Godart and Jacques Neatby bring a wealth of practical experience and in-depth knowledge, with over eight hundred hours of direct observation with more than fifty leadership teams across the globe and thousands of hours working with executives. With this book, they offer solutions to manage conflict and create environments that effectively address misalignments in organizations.

Godart and Neatby take readers through the dual role of leadership team members, the challenges of power games, and the risks of siloed leaders. They give clear advice on how to improve aspects of any leadership team, based on its size and structure and the nature of the organization. While organizational challenges may be inevitable, this book provides leadership teams the tools to correctly diagnose leadership team misalignment, with evidence-based remedies and strategically oriented interventions to maximize organizational performance.

Review Quotes

"C-suite executives will want to take a look."--Publishers Weekly

"Equal parts pragmatic and inspiring, this book bridges a gaping gap: What we think we know about leadership and what it really takes to have an effective leadership team. With actionable insights and spot-on commentary, it's an eye-opening account of what works, what doesn't and why 'best practices' just got strategically better."--Craig S. Smith, Group President, Marriott International Inc.

"In Leadership Team Alignment: From Conflict to Collaboration, Godart and Neatby paint a realistic picture of the uniqueness of top teams and the challenges that often result. Informed by hundreds of hours of observing and working with leadership teams, they address typical behaviors of CEOs and executives and the common pitfalls and traps they fall into, offering a suite of recommendations and practical action items along the way to achieving alignment. It fills an important gap in the business literature."--Michael Walsh, CEO, LexisNexis Legal & Professional

"Leadership teams are where things get done in most organizations, and they often don't work. Godart and Neatby's important new book helps leaders understand the inevitable conflicts and find solutions that actually increase trust and alignment."--Herminia Ibarra, The Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour. London Business School

"Leveraging decades of work on the ground with leaders from across the globe, Godart and Neatby fill their book with actionable insights to create a robust practitioner-oriented guide. Consistently emphasizing the real over the ideal, Leadership Team Alignment illustrates how members of high performing teams can effectively work together to successful pursue their organization's multiple objectives."--Julia Battilana, Professor of Business Administration and Social Innovation, Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School

"While companies face an increasingly challenging and changing environment, while the way the management is leading becomes more and more crucial to recruit and retain employees, this book offers you to analyze your leadership team in a very concrete an efficient way and suggests actionable remedies if necessary. From theory to practice, there is definitely no more room for misalignment."--Eric Forest, Partner, Deloitte France

About the Author

Frédéric Godart is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France where he lectures on power and politics and network effects in organizations. His work has been featured in The Financial Times, The Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes. He has previously worked at McKinsey & Company, where he was involved in multiple strategic studies for a wide range of clients from various industrial sectors. Jacques Neatby is Partner at MindLab and a North-America-based team expert. He has spent two decades advising the executive teams of leading multinationals in North America, Europe and Asia, including as a special advisor to the leadership teams of the world's largest construction materials company.