| McKinsey Classics | July 2021 |
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| When we read that a CEO raised a company’s revenues or profits, at least some people understand that such claims are largely fictional: it was the top team, led by the CEO, that actually developed the strategy responsible for the increase and directed the strategy’s implementation. But there’s an important thing about top teams that’s largely ignored. A typical top team and the people who follow its activities focus on business issues and whether the team got the strategies right. Little attention is paid to the way members of the team interact personally to propose, develop, and apply these strategies. Formal team-building events, behavioral interventions, and facilitated workshops to improve a team’s performance are rare. Business-performance issues get direct and immediate attention; behavioral issues are addressed, if at all, indirectly and after the fact. Yet top teams don’t come together by magic. Improving their performance as teams should be an explicit goal realized through explicit means.
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| Better teams develop better strategies, implement them more successfully, and generate greater confidence among stakeholders. To learn how your top team can improve its performance, not just its strategies, read our 2001 classic “Teamwork at the top.”
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| — Roger Draper, editor, New York |
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| Did You Miss Our Previous McKinsey Classics? |
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| In 2016, a team of McKinsey authors offered some rules for top teams struggling with analytics. For a few of the most important, read our classic “Making data analytics work for you—instead of the other way around.”
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