Creating High Performance Teams

Creating High Performance Teams is an accessible and thorough new introduction to this key area of business education. Written by teams experts Ray Aldag and Loren Kuzuhara, this book provides students with both a firm grounding in the key concepts of the field and the practical tools to become successful team managers and members. Built on a solid foundation of the most up to date research and theory, chapters are packed with case studies, real-world examples, tasks and discussion questions, while a companion website supports the book with a wealth of useful resources for students, team members, and instructors. Centered around an original model for high performance teams, topics covered include: Building and developing effective teams Managing diversity Effective communication Team processes – meetings, performance management Dealing with change and team problems Current issues – virtual teams, globalization With its combined emphasis on principles and application, interwoven with the tools, topics, and teams most relevant today, Creating High Performance Teams is perfectly placed to equip upper-level undergraduate and MBA students with the knowledge and skills necessary to take on teams in any situation.

An adaptation of Wilson's popular seminar, providing practical tips for building teams in organizations. Shows managers how to create a sense of interdependence in a team, how to set goals through participative leadership, how to anticipate problems and deal with them before they arise. Major areas of concentration include shared responsibility, alignment of purpose, and encouraging creative talent. Case studies, dialogs, and ``real world'' examples help managers instill a sense of common purpose, promote communication, and make teams that perform.

A popular maxim states that the only constant in business today is change. Whether the result of growth opportunities, new competition, technological advances or other internal and external factors, every business enterprise must manage change. Since the 1980s, companies have experimented with a method for driving change—High Performance Teams (HPTs), work teams that achieve a quantum leap in results in less than a year. Drawing from over 25 years of experience with HPTs, Marc Hanlan traces their history in a wide variety of industries, analyzes the key factors that contribute to success—or failure—and offers a comprehensive guide to building and managing them successfully. Featuring dozens of case examples and a detailed template for translating plans into action, High Performance Teams shows you how to: prepare the organization, select team leaders and members, set goals, accelerate development times, overcome obstacles, and measure results. Including an extensive bibliography and glossary of key terms and concepts, High Performance Teams will become an indispensable resource for business executives and owners, team leaders and members, and facilitators, trainers, consultants, and coaches. For shareholders, customers, and students of organizational behavior, High Performance Teams offers unique insight into the dynamics of breakthrough business performance.

Build high-performing teams with an evidence-based framework that delivers results Committed is a practical handbook for building great teams. Based on research from Wharton’s Executive Development Program (EDP), this concise guide identifies the common challenges that arise when people work together as a group and provides key guidance on breaking through the barriers to peak performance. Committed draws its insights from the EDP’s living lab: an intensive two-week simulation during which executive-level participants run complex global businesses. The authors have observed over 100 teams collaborating and competing for over 100 combined years in this intense environment. It has yielded fundamental insights about teamwork: what usually goes wrong, what frequently goes right, and the methods and techniques that will help you access your team’s full potential. These insights have been distilled into a simple, repeatable process that you can start applying today. Getting teams engaged and aligned is hard. Committed will give you the tools you need to deal with all of the familiar teamwork challenges that get in the way: organizational politics, delegation, coordination, and aligning skills and motivation. Using vivid stories and examples from the worlds of business, sports, and non-profits, it will teach you how to: Understand the dynamics of successful teams Achieve peak performance using a research-backed methodology Gain expert insight into why most teams underperform Learn the critical points common to all great teams Committed gives you the perspective you need to combine the right people with the right way of collaborating to achieve extraordinary results.

Here's a step-by-step process to recruit, empower and lead teams. How to Build High-Performance Teams focuses on the how-to keys of team-building-from recruiting the right team members to truly empowering them with authority and responsibility for their decisions and performance. You'll understand how to build trust, confidence, and group work skills, balancing and fine-tuning the team process as you go. You'll learn how to: Build and manage teams that live up to their promise of higher productivity and greater problem-solving ability Maximize team productivity by encouraging group discussio.

Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You Whether you are a senior leader or aspire to be one, at some point you’ll face a paradoxical risk. As you pile up successes, your job will get bigger than you, and you may become disoriented by a world of unfamiliar challenges. What Happens Now? will help you learn how to conquer the new challenges of sophistication – rather than just navigating the greater complexity – by doing things you’ve never done before. You will succeed by achieving these goals: • Broadcasting a vision with clarity and purpose • Aligning a high-performing team • Communicating and leading change • Focusing your time and energy in the right places • Investing in coaching and creating other leaders As experienced troubleshooters for hundreds of executives and organizations, John Hillen and Mark Nevins will show you how to foresee the stalls that threaten every leader – and overcome them. JOHN HILLEN, D.Phil., is a leadership and strategy professor in the School of Business at George Mason University, a consultant, and a director for many companies. MARK D. NEVINS, PhD, is an advisor to top executives, teams, and organizations. He has consulted from the C-suite down at Fortune 500 corporations, high-growth startups and private equity portfolio companies, and elite professional and financial services firms. “A practical and enriching guide for leaders.” WALTER ISAACSON International bestselling author “Will help leaders at all levels grow and develop.” MARSHALL GOLDSMITH International Bestselling Author

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.

THE TEN MINUTE TEAM, a dynamic, fast-paced book, demonstrates how team leaders, supervisors, & managers can develop their work groups into high-performing teams. Packed full of how-to information, activities & ideas, this easy-to-read book will help anyone leading a group to achieve team goals. Use it as a team development guide for structured weekly sessions, as a handbook for on-going work with teams, or as a team-building outline. It's currently used in training programs by several FORTUNE 500 companies & as a text in many universities & public schools.