Big Teams


Book Description

This is a book about working with large teams of people. Whether your team involves 30 people or 3,000, the organizational dynamics are significantly different for a project manager used to dealing with smaller teams. As the project scales up in size and complexity, the processes and skills required change. As project leader, your focus moves from the technical aspects of project delivery to enabling, facilitating and integrating the different sub teams into a cohesive whole. Big Teams examines the research on team dynamics and the latest thinking on leadership in a project or program environment. It features stories and case studies based on interviews with project leaders from a range of major projects and programs. Structured around three core themes - Alignment, Engagement, and Resilience - it gives you invaluable, practical guidance on setting up and running an effective team of teams. As with all Tony Llewellyn's books, Big Teams is written in an accessible style with the focus on real-world application, but the academic underpinning is rigorous and will be a useful reference for any student studying project leadership.




The Big Book of Team Coaching Games: Quick, Effective Activities to Energize, Motivate, and Guide Your Team to Success


Book Description

The fun and effective way to BOOST ENGAGEMENT and PRODUCTIVITY Teams that enjoy working together operate on a whole different energy level than teams that don't. They break down silos. They build stronger relationships. They retain what they have learned. And THEY DRIVE RESULTS. The Big Book of Team Coaching Games provides the structure and games you need to build and manage powerful teams. Packed with dozens of physical and verbal activities, it leads you step-by-step through the process of teaching team members how to identify their values, leverage their strengths, and reach their goals--and have fun while they’re doing it! Nothing can stop the momentum of a team that wants to get things done. The Big Book of Team Coaching Games is the ideal playbook for making sure your teams contribute more than their share to the bottom line.




Great Teams


Book Description

What makes a team great? Not just good and not just functional—but great? Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don took the challenge. He began building into his travel schedule opportunities to interview our generation’s greatest team builders from the sports and business worlds. During this process, he conducted more than 100 interviews with some of the most successful teams and organizations in the country. From those interviews, Don identified 16 habits that drive these high-performing teams. Building on the stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization. Great Teams includes: Life lessons from some of the most notable names in sports and business applied to team-making in any situation Interviews from well-known players from Peyton and Eli Manning to Kevin Durant Skills to allow culture to shape who you recruit, manage dysfunction, friction, and strong personalities Advice on how to win in critical situations, embrace change, build a mentoring culture, and see value others miss Great Teams is the ultimate intersection of the sports and business worlds and a powerful companion for thought leaders, teams, managers, and organizations that seek to perform similarly. The insight shared in this book is sure to enhance any team in its pursuit of excellence.




Senior Leadership Teams


Book Description

An organization’s fate hinges on its CEO—right? Not according to the authors of Senior Leadership Teams. They argue that in today's world of neck-snapping change, demands on leaders in top roles are rapidly outdistancing the capabilities of any one person - no matter how talented. Result? Chief executives are turning to their enterprise's senior leaders for help. Yet many CEOs stumble when creating a leadership team. One major challenge is that senior executives often focus more on their individual roles than on the top team's shared work. Without the CEO's careful attention to setting the team up correctly, these high-powered managers often have difficulty pulling together to move their organization forward. Sometimes they don't even agree about what constitutes the right path forward. The authors explain how to determine whether your organization needs a senior leadership team. Then, drawing on their study of 100+ top teams from around the world, they explain how to create a clear and compelling purpose for your team, get the right people on it, provide structure and support, and sharpen team members' competencies - and your own. Timely and practical, this book enables you to create and sustain a leadership team whose members learn from one another while collaborating to pursue your company's objectives.




Big Book of Virtual Teambuilding Games: Quick, Effective Activities to Build Communication, Trust and Collaboration from Anywhere!


Book Description

Get remote team members to interact as if they’re in the same room! Whether you’re videoconferencing with team members across the world or e-mailing a colleague sitting ten feet away, the truth is evident: technology has permanently altered the way we communicate. The virtual workplace can facilitate quicker decision making and reduced overhead. But the lack of face-to-face interaction can also impede trust, innovation, and creativity among team members. The Big Book of Virtual Team-Building Games is packed with games and activities for developing productive virtual teams across all digital platforms, including e-mail, mobile devices, web-based conferencing tools, and social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Skype. The Big Book of Virtual Team-Building Games helps you: Build a greater sense of community and reduce conflict Increase levels of engagement Get the most out of more-introverted team members Boost team members’ productivity Make sure that the only thing separating your people is distance. The Big Book of Virtual Team-Building Games is just the tool you need to develop trusting relationships, foster clear communication, and use technology to enhance the team’s connections.




Leading Teams


Book Description

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




The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams in a PLC at Work


Book Description

"In The Big Book of Tools for Collaborative Teams in a PLC at Work, author William M. Ferriter provides educators with a collection of tools and resources designed to strengthen the practice of collaborative teams. Teachers working in a professional learning community (PLC) have the capacity to improve learning for every student; however, teacher teams face many challenges while striving to make a meaningful impact on learning. The tools in this book help educators combat the problems that teams encounter and provide an explicit structure for learning teams. Ferriter organizes the book around the four critical questions of PLCs, and each chapter thoroughly explores core behaviors that efficient teams require and templates for extending the work. By reading this book, educators will learn how to navigate the challenges their teams face by receiving targeted support"--




Great Business Teams


Book Description

Understand and decode the inner workings of great business teams with the more than 30 in-depth examples in Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance. Author Howard Guttman examines and dissects teams at top-management, business-unit, and functional levels and isolates five key factors that drive team performance to offer you insight into the ways these teams achieve success. Using this book, go directly to the marketplace to scrutinize teams in a variety of industries, evaluating the challenges they face and the methods they choose to manage these challenges.




The Secret of Teams


Book Description

Teams are critical to the success of every organization. Departmental, interdepartmental, cross-functional, ad hoc, task-specific—teams do everything from planning the office party to setting the annual budget to establishing performance goals. But what separates the teams that really deliver from the ones that simply spin their wheels? What is the secret of high-performance teams? As he did in The Secret, Mark Miller uses a compelling business fable to reveal profound yet easily grasped truths that can dramatically transform any organization. Debbie Brewster, the heroine of The Secret, has been promoted and is now struggling with taking her new team to the next level. Her old mentor, Jeff Brown, the company’s CEO, sends her out to find the secret of teams. On her journey she learns from three very different teams—the Special Forces, NASCAR, and a local restaurant. Debbie and her team discover the three elements that all successful teams have in common. But that’s just the beginning. The devil is in the details, as the story of Debbie’s efforts to actually implement the three elements shows. You’ll learn how to change entrenched ways of thinking and acting, what you have to do to optimize each of the three elements of a successful team, how to measure your progress, and more. Creating high-performance teams does more than just give your organization a competitive advantage. It can be a performance multiplier that significantly improves results while honoring and developing people. It may be the ultimate win-win-win that your organization is seeking.




High Performing Investment Teams


Book Description

High Performing Investment Teams "Although most leaders agree teamwork is important, few businesses effectively build collaborative, synchronized teams. High Performing Investment Teams is an excellent guidepost for any manager striving to create a winning team and develop bench strength for the future." —John W. Rogers Jr., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ariel Capital Management, LLC "Turning individual talent into team performance is the ultimate challenge for an investment organization, but also the key to building a sustainable investment franchise. Focus Consulting has captured the essence of how to leverage your intellectual capital for maximum and enduring success." —Michelle R. Seitz, CFA, Principal, Head of Investment Management, Executive Committee Member, William Blair & Company, LLC "Focus Consulting's work on behaviors of top teams is clear, effective, and practical. We recommend it highly for investment firms that are serious about world-class collaboration." —Terry Toth, President, Northern Trust Global Investments "Focus Consulting really understands that attracting and motivating talented people makes all the difference for asset managers. Their work is based on years of experience helping investment firms build strong cultures with productive behaviors." —Scott Powers, Chief Executive Officer, Old Mutual Asset Management "Focus Consulting understands the people aspect of the investment business. They know the investment business and how to make collaboration work." —Harin de Silva, PhD, CFA, President, Analytic Investors