In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

A unique exploration of the emotionally charged adult youth sports experience. Fewer than 2% of athletes ever play Division I sports, and for those who do, it’s not always a positive experience. The pressures begin in youth sports and rarely let up. “Team Adult”—the parents, coaches, and administrators facilitating youth, high school, and college sports—need to turn inward and explore their own motivations and intentions in order to effect real change for the benefit of young athletes everywhere. In For the Team: How to Improve the Youth Sports Experience for Everyone, sports mom, former Division I athlete, and coach Meagan Frank provides an invaluable guide for the adults in the youth sports landscape. She urges them to take personal responsibility in creating an emotionally healthy place for kids to learn, play, and grow, no matter the level of competition and no matter the stakes. Frank takes a deep-dive into highly-charged topics surrounding youth sports and shares key strategies “Team Adult” can adopt, including actively listening to the young athletes, respecting their choices, encouraging sports activities outside of the competitive environment, and carving out time for the family and other interests. Full of personal insights, interviews with experts, discussions with coaches, and surveys from hundreds of parents and children, For the Team features emotional discoveries and practical advice that will improve family and team dynamics and bring youth sports back to where it should be—as one small yet important part of a child’s development into a healthy, confident, and happy individual.

This text provides a good balance of theory and practice. It combines cutting-edge research on groups with practical management principles. The text is organized into 3 primary tasks for the leader/manager: 1) Accurately assessing and improving team performance; 2) Managing the internal dynamics of teams (diversity, conflict, and creativity); and 3) Optimally leveraging the team within the larger organization. It is written for both team leaders and team members.

From the New York Times bestselling author of My Share of the Task and Leaders, a manual for leaders looking to make their teams more adaptable, agile, and unified in the midst of change. When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. Al Qaeda in Iraq was a decentralized network that could move quickly, strike ruthlessly, then seemingly vanish into the local population. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment, and training—but none of that seemed to matter. To defeat Al Qaeda, they would have to combine the power of the world’s mightiest military with the agility of the world’s most fearsome terrorist network. They would have to become a "team of teams"—faster, flatter, and more flexible than ever. In Team of Teams, McChrystal and his colleagues show how the challenges they faced in Iraq can be rel­evant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and or­ganizations today. In periods of unprecedented crisis, leaders need practical management practices that can scale to thousands of people—and fast. By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organiza­tion, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions. Drawing on compelling examples—from NASA to hospital emergency rooms—Team of Teams makes the case for merging the power of a large corporation with the agility of a small team to transform any organization.

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

Rooting for the Home Team examines how various American communities create and maintain a sense of collective identity through sports. Looking at large cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles as well as small rural towns, suburbs, and college towns, the contributors consider the idea that rooting for local athletes and home teams often symbolizes a community's preferred understanding of itself, and that doing so is an expression of connectedness, public pride and pleasure, and personal identity. Some of the wide-ranging essays point out that financial interests also play a significant role in encouraging fan bases, and modern media have made every seasonal sport into yearlong obsessions. Celebrities show up for big games, politicians throw out first pitches, and taxpayers pay plenty for new stadiums and arenas. The essays in Rooting for the Home Team cover a range of professional and amateur athletics, including teams in basketball, football, baseball, and even the phenomenon of no-glove softball. Contributors are Amy Bass, Susan Cahn, Mark Dyreson, Michael Ezra, Elliott J. Gorn, Christopher Lamberti, Allison Lauterbach, Catherine M. Lewis, Shelley Lucas, Daniel A. Nathan, Michael Oriard, Carlo Rotella, Jaime Schultz, Mike Tanier, David K. Wiggins, and David W. Zang.

This Manual is for those who wish to acquire, manage, and value the talents of team leaders and team members. Those who work in or for a team want to make it work. This document is for anyone committed to the team who wants to contribute and add value to their daily work. Particularly for managers, leaders, coaches, mentors, and those working in Human Resources. For those who believe that the human capital of a team is worth much more than individuals and their cost if the team works. For those who use or want to use the Team-CARE Assessment. How do we make the team work well? You need to take care of it! That's why Team-CARE. No people are talents in themselves, but each has talents and skills to make available or at the service of others. It's about discovering them, inspiring them, giving them the proper role, and valuing them in the team to win together. Let's find out how! If you have a problem at work, you may not need to change the people you work with. It would help if you changed how you see them, motivate them, manage them, and value them. If you have weaknesses, you can try to improve them, but sometimes it's better to leverage each other's strengths and work together. If you're a striker, play with a goalkeeper instead of forcing yourself to play as a goalkeeper.