Who's in the Room? How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them

Is your company run by a team with no name?

At the top of every organization chart lies a myth?that a Senior Management Team makes a company's critical decisions. The reality is that critical decisions are typically made by the boss and a small group of confidants?a "team with no name"?outside of formal processes. Meanwhile, other members of the management team wonder why they weren't in the room or even consulted ahead of time. The dysfunction that results from this gap between myth and reality has led to years of unproductive team building exercises. The problems, Frisch shows, are ones of process and structure, not psychology.

In Who's in the Room? Bob Frisch provides a unique perspective to this widely misunderstood issue. Flying in the face of decades of organizational psychology, he argues that the solution lies not in addressing behaviors, but in unseating the senior management team as the epicenter of decision making. Using a broad portfolio of teams?large and small, permanent and temporary, formal and informal?great leaders match each decision to the appropriate team in a fluid, flexible approach that you won't find described in management textbooks.

Who's in the Room? is based on interviews with CEOs at organizations ranging from MasterCard to Ticketmaster to The Red Cross.

• Understand and embrace the way decision-making actually happens in their organizations
• Use these "teams with no names" to best advantage
• Engage the Senior Management Team in the three critical tasks for which it is ideally suited 

Organizations will get better decisions and superior results by unleashing the full potential of their Senior Management Teams. And bosses will see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into their offices asking, "Why wasn't I in the room?"

Introduction: Who’s in the Room? 1

Part One: From Problem to Portfolio 5

1 Most Companies Are Run by Teams with No Names 7

The Myth of the Top Team

Illusion and Reality

The Problem That Isn’t There, But Won’t Go Away

2 Team Building Won’t Solve the Problem 21

When the Shrinks Go Marching In

After the Shrinks Have Gone

3 Don’t Blame the Boss 29

In Search of the Ideal Leader

Inside the Box

Do the ‘‘Rights’’ Thing

4 Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams 41

Mission Control Versus Knights of the Round Table: Functional Specialists or Reflections of the CEO?

The Team Versus the Legislature: The Representative from Finance, the Senator from Operations

The House Versus the Senate: Are Some More Equal Than Others?

The Majority Versus the Majority: The Impossibility of Deciding

Maybe the Problem Is That There Is No Problem

5 Case Study: How One CEO Transformed His Top Team 57

The Past as Prologue

Moving from a Single Top Team to Multiple Teams

The Team That Sits Together Works Together

Tailoring the Structure to Suit Your Needs as a Leader

6 Best Practices: Design an Organization That Delivers the Outcomes You Need 73

The Three Centers of Gravity

Flexing in Five Dimensions

The Portfolio and the Payoff

Part Two: The Senior Management Team Unbound 91

7 Engage the Senior Management Team in Three Critical Conversations No Other Team Can Have 93

8 Align the Senior Management Team Around a Common View of the World 99

The Starting Point: Aligning Around Trends

Clustering Trends into Drivers of Change

Understanding Capabilities and Assets

Walking the Boundaries of the Company: Testing Walls and Fences

Defining and Selecting Opportunities

9 Prioritize and Integrate Initiatives to Hit the Strategic Bull’s-Eye 119

Asking the Nearly Impossible: Prioritizing Initiatives

The Real Source of the Difficulty

Changing the Conversation

It’s All Relative

Hitting the Bull’s-Eye: Making Initiatives Work Together

10 Move from ‘‘Should We Do This?’’ to ‘‘How Do We Do This?’’ 145

It All Depends: Why Initiatives Fail

Putting on the Brakes: The Value of Parochialism

The American Red Cross: Managing Dependencies at the Speed of Disaster

Going from ‘‘Should’’ to ‘‘How’’

Fixing What’s Actually Broken

11 Tailor Your Portfolio of Teams for Top Performance Now 167

Thinking It Through

Putting the New Approach into Motion

Repurposing the SMT

Who’s in the Room?

Acknowledgments 179

The Author 183

Index 185