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Executive Interviews: Interview with Howard M Guttman on Building High Performance Teams
May 2009
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By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary
Congratulations on your latest
book, Great Business Teams:
Cracking the Code for Standout
Performance. In it, you have
examined the inner workings of over
30 business teams, at topmanagement,
business-unit, and
functional levels, to offer a radically
new vision of the emerging horizontal
organization and of the highperforming
teams that are the
cornerstone of its success. What are
the insights from this book on great
business teams?
I think readers will be struck by how
deeply people change when they are
exposed to this model. There is a
fundamental difference in the way
they view themselves vis-à-vis the
other players on their team, their
leader, and, ultimately, the
organization. Functional and selfinterest
take a back seat to “winning
for the business”; responsibility and
accountability are no longer avoided,
but embraced; and every team
member behaves as though he or she
were an owner of the business. There has been a lot of talk about how
to improve performance at both the
team and the organization levels, but
you rarely hear first-hand stories from
companies who’ve done it. Great
Business Teams provide lots of them
– along with proven ways to
overcome the challenges that
inevitably arise.
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Can you take us through the
background research for this book?
What was the trigger point for this
book? What was the tipping point of
this book?
After almost 30 years of consulting
with senior executive teams
throughout the world, we realized
that there is a code for standout
performance: one that applies to
every organization, regardless of size,
type, or industry affiliation. We
wanted to share this code with
organizations that were trying to
change their game. Cracking the code will help them acquire a sustained
competitive advantage and the ability
to excel in a very difficult
marketplace. -
What according to you are great
business teams?What is ‘great’?What
are the differences between ordinary
business teams and great business
teams?What are the classic behaviors
exhibited by non-high-performing
teams?
A great team is one in which every
player is a leader. What makes such a
team ‘great’ is that it is riveted on
business results – not just on
achieving the goals it has been given,
but on continually raising the bar. A
great team is anti-status quo. Underperforming teams, on the other
hand, are teams made up of
followers. They generally defer to the
leader, whom they see as the one
primarily responsible for results.
They view themselves first and
foremost as functional ambassadors
to the team. Their behavior is
characterized by inter-functional
rivalry and competition for resources.
They are often wary of one another,
and conflict may be expressed either
overtly – in unproductive
confrontations – or covertly – as
subterfuge and underground
behavior. -
In the book, you talk a lot about
“aligning” teams? What is this
process and what does it
accomplish?
When an organization is properly
aligned, its parts move in sync to
achieve results. There is a straight
line of sight that goes from the
organization’s strategy to its
customers. Scarce human, financial,
and capital resources are deployed
along that line of sight, so value gets
created and added quickly,
consistently, and cost effectively. This
makes the aligned organization
fiercely competitive and an ultimate
high-performance entity. And you
can’t have an aligned organization without aligned teams. The first step
in moving a team to higher
performance is “aligning” it, or
making sure that all its members
reach agreement, in five key areas:
business strategy; business
deliverables coming fromthe strategy;
roles and responsibilities; protocols,
or ground rules, for decision making
and conflict resolution; business/
interpersonal relationships. The
resulting clarity and congruity
eliminate a large part of the conflict
that keeps teams from resolving
issues and achieving results.
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