Teams are fast becoming a flexible and efficient way to enhance organizational performance. This Harvard Business Review collection brings together the ideas and research from Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, who argue that we cannot meet the challenges ahead, from total quality to customer service to innovation, without teams. This collection includes The Wisdom of Teams and The Discipline of Teams.

The definitive classic on high-performance teams The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than fifteen languages, the authors’ clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Using engaging case studies and testimonials from both successful and failed teams—ranging from Fortune 500 companies to the U.S. Army to high school sports—the authors explain the dynamics of teams both in great detail and with a broad view. Their conclusions and prescriptions span the familiar to the counterintuitive: • Commitment to performance goals and common purpose is more important to team success than team building. • Opportunities for teams exist in all parts of the organization. • Real teams are the most successful spearheads of change at all levels. • Working in teams naturally integrates performance and learning. • Team “endings” can be as important to manage as team “beginnings.” Wisdom lies in recognizing a team’s unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits—development of individual members, team accomplishments, and stronger companywide performance. Katzenbach and Smith’s comprehensive classic is the essential guide to unlocking the potential of teams in your organization.

In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore the often counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams—such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility—and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development. The result is improved productivity and teams that can be counted on to deliver more than just the sum of their parts. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

Publisher Fact Sheet Renowned business teams expert reveals what motivates employees to succeed.

Hackman (social and organizational psychology, Harvard U.) identifies the factors of being a team leader that will enable a team to work together efficiently to achieve organizational goals. He suggests that five conditions are necessary: having a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert team coaching. He integrates insights from interviews with team leaders with concepts from the social sciences. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why? The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational—that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's also what makes it so powerful. For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven methodology for identifying your culture's three most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; and authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of “emotional intuition” or social connectedness. By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.

Organizations thrive or struggle as a result of interactions among team members. To optimize the performance of teams, Group Dynamics and Team Interventions bridges the gap between the most up-to-date academic research findings about group behavior and real-life practice. Chapters summarize the theories behind group and team behavior while offering proven application and intervention techniques that can be utilized in workplace settings. Topics addressed include team formation and development; understanding culture and team diversity; improving team cohesion, decision making, and problem solving; managing and reducing team conflict; team leadership, power, and influence; and others. Brief case studies and interventions that illustrate each theory help to enhance the clarity of the topics. Group Dynamics and Team Interventions will benefit academics and practitioners alike, who gain from a better understanding of the dynamics that inform team behavior, along with assessment tools and practical intervention techniques to create and maintain a high-performing team.