Building Smart Teams is an essential guide to creating a smart team fast. Based on research results from close to 2,000 individuals organized in more than 250 teams, Building Smart Teams identifies the three critical skill sets that teams need and shows how to transfer these skills to a group. The authors' research and experience shows that, by concentrating on these three critical skills sets, a group is almost certain to quickly become a high performing team. High-functioning teams are increasingly important to organizational success, but just throwing a team together will not give the desired results. Building Smart Teams gives you the theory and rationale behind high performance teams, but, in addition, it is packed with exercises, diagnostic tools, tips, and techniques to use with groups. The exercises are time-tested with the more than 100 groups trained by the authors. The approach is not to dictate the one best way for teams to behave, but, rather, to help team members build skills and implement processes to increase success. Within this model, there is ample room for teams to discover their own unique culture, performance strategies, and paths to success.

Lead each person on your team up the learning curve. What's the secret to having an engaged and productive team? It's having a plan for developing all employees--no matter where they are on their personal learning curves. Better morale and higher performance happen through learning, argues Whitney Johnson. In over twenty years of coaching, investing, and consulting, Johnson has seen that employees need continuous learning and fresh challenges to stay motivated. The best bosses know this, and they know how to make it happen by thoughtfully designing people’s jobs around the skills they have today as well as the skills they'll need to be even more valuable tomorrow. That's how entire organizations stay competitive in an unpredictable, rapidly changing business environment. In this book, Johnson explains how to become one of those bosses and how to build your A-team by: Identifying what your employees already know and what they need to learn Designing their jobs to maximize engagement and learning Applying a seven-step process for leading each person up their learning curve We all want opportunities to learn, experiment, and grow in our jobs. When our bosses work with us to help us leap to new challenges, the result is a team that knows how to thrive, no matter what the future holds.

Communicate, congregate and collaborate more effectively than ever Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to enhance team productivity. Building on the concepts presented in Smart Work, which focuses on personal productivity, this book shows you how to turn unproductive team behaviours that create friction into ‘superproductive’ behaviours that promote flow. Productivity is, at its core, a leadership issue — and this book provides practical guidelines that help you build a culture where productivity thrives. Working together can be a drag — literally. Email noise, unproductive meetings and poorly organised projects can stifle creativity and disrupt everyone’s workflow. But by creating team agreements that raise awareness of the negative impact of our behaviours, you build the desire and capability to change. This book is packed with tips, guidelines and expert insights for leaders and managers at any level. Foster a culture of ‘superproductivity’ Create a set of Smart Team principles to guide cooperation Run fewer, shorter and more effective meetings Collaborate more productively on projects Reduce urgency, interruptions and email noise People want their work to matter, they want to make an impact and they want to do it all with a healthy work-life balance — productivity is the key to making it all happen. Smart Teams shows you how to implement the culture shift that will allow your team to flourish.

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.

Use technology to increase loyalty and productivity in your employees 50 Digital Team-Building Games offers fun, energizing meeting openers, team activities, and group adventures for business teams, using Twitter, GPS, Facebook, smartphones, and other technology. The games can be played in-person or virtually, and range from 5-minute ice-breakers to an epic four-hour GPS-based adventure. Designed to be lead by managers, facilitators, presenters, and speakers, the activities help teams and groups get comfortable with technology, get to know each other better, build trust, improve communication, and more. No need to be a "techie" to lead these games—they're simple and well-scripted. Author John Chen is the CEO of Geoteaming, a company that uses technology and adventure to teach teams how to collaborate. How to lead a simple, fast, fun team building activity with easy-to-follow instructions How to create successful "virtual" team building that requires NO travel and little to no additional expenses How to engage standoffish engineers, "hard to reach" technical teams, or Gen X/Y teammates with technology they enjoy using Successful technology-based team building can build buzz for your company, build critically important relationships and communication internally, and keep your team talking about it for weeks afterward!

An engaging, relevant text, Working in Teams explores the major concepts related to team success and prepares students to lead and work in and lead collaborative, interdependent environments. Authors Brian A. Griffith, PhD, and Ethan B. Dunham EdM, MBA, teach readers to accomplish specific goals in teams, foster the development of individual members, and transform “high-potential” groups into “high performing” teams. Readers will develop a strong, practical foundation in topics essential to effective teamwork: team design and development, interpersonal dynamics, leadership, communication, decision making, creativity and innovation, diversity, project management, and performance evaluation.

`This book is a must for scholars and practitioners interested in managing work teams in organizations.... Yeatts and Hyten have written an excellent reference work. The book synthesizes a wealth of prior research into a testable model of Self-Managed Work Team performance' - Management Learning`The work is wide-ranging in its scope but retains a clear focus and coherence throughout.' International Journal of Public-Private PartnershipsSince the mid-1970s, pressure from international competition has forced business in the United States to look for better ways to achieve and maintain a competitive position. One popular tool is the self-managed work-team (SMWT). This book provides a thorough examination of SMWT both at the level of theory and at the practical level of when to use work teams to find solutions and how to develop successful teams.By examining the most widely accepted theories of work-team performance, illustrated by 10 case studies from the areas of manufacturing, public service and health care, the authors define: how high-performing self-managed work teams differ from work groups and short-term teams; the problems which compel an organization to create such teams; the factors which explain successful self-managed work teams; and how to develop high performing cost-effective teams.