STANFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
  
Cover of Leadership Team Alignment by Frédéric Godart and Jacques Neatby
Leadership Team Alignment
From Conflict to Collaboration
Frédéric Godart and Jacques Neatby


BUY THIS BOOK

August 2023
248 pages.
$30.00

Hardcover ISBN: 9781503630826
Ebook ISBN: 9781503636590

Request Review/Desk/Examination Copy

CITATION

DescriptionDesc.
Reviews
Excerpts and More

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.

About the authors

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.

"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.

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Publishers Weekly