Leadership Team Alignment: From Conflict to Collaboration

by Frédéric Godart, Jacques Neatby

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.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published August 22, 2023

Reviews

[Mindaugas Mozūras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leadership Teams are designed for conflict.

This is a book specifically about top leadership teams. There are not many like that. As a top leadership team member, I found it quite interesting. The book consists of six chapters:

- The Dual Role of LT Members
- Power Games at the Top
- Of Hubs, Spokes, and Silo Busting
- Who Really Sits on Your LT, and What Is Its Role?
- Getting your LT's Size and Composition Right
- Assess Your LT and Fix it

I especially enjoyed the insights about power/influence and the practical advice on improving the leadership teams. The chapter on size/composition felt a bit disconnected from the rest, and I found it the least interesting.

Overall, highly recommend the book to anyone on a top leadership team (which makes for a limited number of people).

[Dmitry · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the book's primary audience are CEOs and their immediate teams, I found it extremely useful as someone who supports this level of decision-makers (and hopes to be one someday). The "formal" corporate culture conveyed by human resource practitioners and LinkedIn gurus emphasizes the virtues of collaboration and inclusion in decision-making as absolute and self-evident entities that are antithetical to the dreaded silos. The authors go a lot deeper, with a lot more nuance and practicality. Instead of demonizing departmental silos or executive power politics - the book sees them as organic dynamics at the very top of the corporate ladder, which can be harnessed in productive ways for the very top decision-makers, and must be understood by those supporting them.

As other reviewers noted, this is not an academic volume given the practicality packed into every page. More importantly from my perspective, it is also not one of the thousands of leadership books that convey one idea or a framework in the first chapter to repeat it ad nauseum in application to scenarios that ultimately yield little in the way of incremental insights. It would certainly be corny and hyperbolic to compare it with The Leviathan or The Prince, so I will simply say that these comparisons arise in my mind because of the authors' highly pragmatic take on human nature and the inevitability of some of its elements.

The book is pricey, but it is certainly worth it in my mind, as it gives me a new set of tools to assess why some things that I would have expected from my boss or his colleagues sometimes work out in a very different way. Rather than feeling anger and anxiety about things that are firmly out of my control, the book offers insights that help unpack the underlying causes of C-suite decision outcomes. In doing so, it also offers hope that those of us supporting the top decision-makers can be more nuanced and purposeful with our own advice.

[John Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leadership Team Alignment: From Conflict to Collaboration by Frédéric Godart and Jacques Neatby sheds light on the leadership team (LT): how it works, how it can go wrong, and how leaders can fix it. Co-written by two leading experts on corporate leadership, the slim but impactful book draws on over 800 hours of direct observation of 56 leadership teams in 18 different industries over two decades, together with the latest scholarly research on issues of power, networks and dynamics at the top of organizations. The book is divided into two sections. Part 1, “Embracing Leadership Reality,” explores the dual role of leadership team members, power games at the top, and the phenomena of hubs, spokes and silo busting. Chapters are well-illustrated with real-life examples and current data, and leavened with pop culture references to shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards, as well as moments of humour and candid reflections on the authors’ own experiences working with and advising many of the world’s leading executives. This section lets the CEO know that any problems they may be experiencing with their LT are probably not unique to them, and can be fixed. Part 2, “Systematically Improving Your Leadership Team’s Effectiveness,” builds on the context provided by Part 1 to deliver practical advice to CEOs, asking “who really sits on your LT and what is its role?” and leading leaders to consider how to get the size and composition of their LT just right, how to assess their LT’s effectiveness and how to improve it.

Writing in an authoritative, direct, clear yet friendly tone, the authors very effectively consider and anticipate the needs of the busy executive reader, using subtitles and key questions to clarify their arguments. Helpful summaries of key arguments as well as “actionable insights” at the end of each chapter contribute to the book’s success as a deeply researched, enjoyable, practical guide to how CEOs can improve their leadership teams and how their direct reports can better understand how organizations are led. Although aimed principally at executives, this lively and deeply informed guide to what a leadership team is, how it works, and how it can be improved, will also be of interest and use to board members; to business students, professors and scholars; and to general readers curious about what goes on in the often-mysterious black box of the leadership team – those groups of individuals whose decisions shape the lives and careers of countless workers, the success of businesses, and ultimately the dynamism of national economies.

[Sandrinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in charge of the content, agenda and flow of the executive and board retreats for a large bank. This book had so many a-ha moments for me. It was incredibly insightful and adressed topics that are not sufficiently discussed or written on executive teams. Pragmatic and inspiring, it shed light on something most of us are trying to put our finger on. What further made this book relevant, is the deep on the ground years of experience from the authors- moving away from what could have been a book that would have only been perfect in theory. I came away with real practical tools and recommendations which I applied right away- for impact and much better executive meetings. Highly recommend to anyone on any management team with power dynamics and cross functional goals to agree to and execute on.

[Mike Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a C-suite executive, I very much enjoyed Neatby and Godart’s book on Leadership Team Alignment - even if parts of it were embarrassingly accurate. They do a very good job of identifying the main challenges in high-pressure LTs and deliver clear, actionable insights and solutions to those challenges, including worksheets and sample agendas in the appendix.

[Michelle Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Well researched with high quality sources. Very practical and applicable not just theoretical. This is a good advanced leadership book I can use with ceo client that is still grounded in the day to day challenges.

[Debbie Collard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It's full of practical and actionable advice for getting Leadership Teams aligned and keeping them that way.

[Michael Cant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all great business books, this one is a treasure chest of critical insights and practices. Everything was brought to life with the many real-life stories of CEOs and how they ensure their leadership teams function properly. The chapter on assessing and fixing your leadership team was particularly powerful for me. It not only gave a simple few questions to ask to see whether your LT has problems. It also detailed the POP approach to making executive meetings do what they are supposed to do - focus executives on successfully executing the strategy. The stories really made it clear how something as simple as POP can be a turning point for an executive team, engage in constructive conflict and ultimately work better together. Definitely recommend this book to any executive looking for sustainable ways to improve leadership team effectiveness.