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Time Magazine Article

Feb 9, 2009

Explore the journey of building great business teams through strategic alignment.

Explore the journey of building great business teams through strategic alignment.

Time

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Top Business Teams

FROM FEBRUARY 9, 2009

A Lesson Straight from Mars


Realigning its organization provided a sweet payoff for the candy company.

In his book Great Business Teams, consultant Howard M. Guttman discusses five steps to greatness. The first phase involves two critical tasks: getting an organization horizontal and aligning teams properly. In this excerpt, Paul Michaels, CEO of Mars Inc., the world’s largest candy company—which is rarely written about—discusses the path to proper alignment.


Moving the organizational mountain in a radically different, horizontal direction is not easy, regardless of benefit. Fear of change and widespread initiative fatigue make the status quo very seductive.


When Paul Michaels became president of Mars Inc. in 2004, he knew the company needed to achieve far greater growth and financial return. But he faced internal organizational challenges every bit as daunting as those in the marketplace. The top team at Mars was siloed and replete with unspoken agendas. Members did not see the benefit of working as a team; they were only concerned with the success of their own region.


There was some infighting, but mostly people just left one another alone. Michaels believed the high-performance, horizontal model represented the best bet for the future. To drive his vision through the organization, he first created a “burning platform” for the change, centered on business issues. He then shrewdly hooked his vision into Mars’ core values.


He explains:“Mars has five guiding principles, one of which is efficiency, and high-performing teams are by far the most efficient way of operating... By using this process, teams quickly begin having authentic conversations in real time: dealing with issues and not dancing around them. You see the impact quickly; people either step up or opt out. It becomes very evident where your issues are, who your players are, and what you need to do to change the shape of the business. This model can speed up progress in these areas by years.”


Michaels had been creating great business teams within a horizontal organizational setting for years. His colleagues were well aware that in previous positions at Mars, he had moved brand teams (e.g., Snickers, M&Ms) and the Americas team to the high-performance, horizontal model. He had willingly given those teams more responsibility and power, so his new team knew he was coming from a place of respect for company values—and a solid track record of results.


Past experience had taught Michaels that functional thinking and hidden agendas are classic behaviors exhibited by non-high-performing teams. More than a “burning platform” was needed to counteract old habits and the natural tendency toward standpattism. Michaels’ solution was to take his team through an “alignment”—an essential step in the transformation process to great business teams.


This is where the leader-visionary evolves into the leader-architect. Alignment is one of those buzzwords that come loaded with baggage. To some, it conjures up a mechanistic world: alignment is what mechanics do to an automobile when the steering is out of whack. But alignment also evokes images of living organisms, as when a chiropractor aligns the body, readjusting the skeletal system to restore better balance and integration. The alignment of teams and organizations has more to do with the human side of the term than its mechanistic counterpart.


When an organization is properly aligned, its parts move in sync to achieve results. There is a straight line of sight from the organization’s strategy to its customers. Scarce human, financial, and capital resources are deployed along that line of sight, so value is created and added quickly, consistently, and cost-effectively.


This makes the aligned organization fiercely competitive and an ultimate high-performance entity. You cannot have an aligned organization without aligned teams. For an organization to raise its performance level, every team, at every level, must be a great team. That is to say, it must be aligned, or in sync, in five key areas:

  1. Business strategy

  2. Business deliverables coming from the strategy

  3. Roles and responsibilities at individual and business-unit or functional levels

  4. Protocols or ground rules for decision-making and conflict resolution

  5. Business/interpersonal relationships and interdependencies


The alignment process is the foundation for building those performance-based, leader-player relationships that characterize high-performance teams. A team alignment is an opportunity for collective deep thinking and reevaluation, allowing the leader and their team to establish the blueprint for high performance.

In Michaels’ case, his team spent two intensive days in heated discussions about what they needed to accomplish, who was responsible for what, and who had the authority to make which decisions. They called one another out on unacceptable interpersonal behavior: failure to share information, lack of follow-through, riding roughshod over others, unilateral decision-making, backbiting, and subterfuge.

Michaels made it clear he expected to be treated like every other member of the team. He wanted direct feedback and insisted on being held accountable for commitments and results. By the end of the two days, Michaels’ team was on its way to becoming great.


Excerpted with permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc. from Great Business Teams.© 2008 Howard M. Guttman


Contact Information Guttman Development Strategies, Inc. 400 Valley Road, Suite 103Mt. Arlington, NJ 07856 973.770.7177 www.guttmandev.com

Posted through the courtesy of the Editors of Time Magazine © 2009 Time Inc.

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