Leadership Team Alignment: From Conflict to Collaboration

Godart, an organizational behavior professor at the INSEAD business school in France, and Neatby, a management consultant, debut with a competent program on how CEOs can foster harmony and cooperation among executives and managers. Leadership teams are crucial to an organization’s success, the authors argue, suggesting they constitute the most efficient means for executives to influence their organization. Managing them effectively means resolving disagreements caused by the conflicting goals of different departments (sales and legal teams often butt heads, the authors observe, because the former’s desire for flexibility during negotiations clashes with the latter’s focus on risk management), and CEOs can do so by encouraging executives to make explicit their group’s objectives, ensuring conflict isn’t seen as interpersonal. To tamp down power struggles, Godart and Neatby recommend CEOs express disapproval when executives take swipes at each other, and to foster collaboration, CEOs might connect managers working toward similar objectives who might not be acquainted with each other. The advice is sensible, but the business-world jargon can feel a bit deadening (leadership teams are an “underused value creation lever”), and sections on how to fend off power plays from below will have limited relevance for those not on the top rungs of the corporate ladder. Still, C-suite executives will want to take a look. (Aug.)