How Teamwork Works

Organisations are living organisms characterised by their process not their structures. It is a mistake to consider people as things to be measured, fixed overheads in the budget, objects to be re-engineered to fit into the re-engineered organisation. Teams are complex systems. The team in action creates the structures in which it lives. The best teams manage their own relationships and processes. They perform consistently and continue to optimise their performance. They have leaders, roles, goals and measures but they continually re-invent themselves. This is a book about how teams excel, not why. They are most predictable when their potential is constrained by their past. Effective teams have discovered who they are, having ceased to worry about who they should be. As teams develop, they learn to self-regulate, to self-govern and to self-direct. Teams which surprise and delight with their innovations are fulfilling their potential. Their identity is not something that can be given; and, once discovered, it cannot be taken away. It is in the doing and the being that their discovery is made.

Part I (Team Systems) describes how a team operates as a complex system with an organic life cycle. Part II (Team Development) describes the team experience. It shows how teams discover their identity whilst confronting resistance to change. Part III (Team Meetings) focuses on communication skills that facilitate the team's task whilst furthering its development. These include warming up, facilitation and leadership, descriptive feedback, speaking skills, questioning skills, listening skills and reaching closure. Part IV (Team Task) shows how process skills and the 'team task cycle' (recognition, understanding, decision, implementation and completion) apply to the archetypal project team.

People work in teams because they have the potential to create something they cannot create alone. People have an innate need to contribute. By maximising the quality of contact between team members, teams maximise their performance. This book details this process.

ISBN: 0 - 07 - 707942 - 6

PRICE: £22.95 - + postage and packaging (hardback)

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