Book Description

Practical Exercises + Active Theory = TEAM SUCCESS!Some books show you how to structure experiential learning. Other books give you a showcase of experiential initiatives. Few books have effectively combined experiential theory and practice. Until now! Ed Rose assembles a framework for learning-by-doing; then he gives you active, practical exercises you'll use right away.In the past, you've had to struggle to encourage active participation. First, you stumbled through developing your own training design. Then you waded through game books to find one with suitably dynamic, practical exercises. Now everything you need is in a single source. An active framework complemented by active initiatives -- 50 Ways to Teach Your Learner has everything you need!Rose enables you to:

• Evaluate team-development needs
• Build an environment of trust and recognition
• Encourage adaptability and readiness for change
• Use simple and inexpensive props with maximum effect
• Conduct successful post-exercise debriefs . . . and much more! ... Read more

  Reviews (4)

  Great Resource
  I am a training consultant and have a whole bookshelf of books like this.I find i come back to this one and "quick Teambuilding Activities for busy managers" over and over again.This one has GREAT activities that are so effective and relatively easy to use.All have a specific learning objective.Descriptions are easy to follow.But most importantly, the activities are truly wonderful.Puzzel, especially...if I had to give the author royalties everytime i used that activity, he'd be rich!

  Great book for motivating LOW WAGE EARNERS!!
  I have placed this book on the desks of all my managers and instructed them to follow it to the letter.

  It has been instrumental in motivating under compensated employees into thinking they have a chance of achieving the American Dream.The "team" concept is brilliant!
  This book is great for the high technology company trying to compete with low wage Asian labor.
  The "team" concept of Rose & Buckley with show you how to motivate "team members" while paying them subsistence wages.

  OUTSTANDING!

  This book is EXCEPTIONAL.Perfect for the corporate offsite
  This book is outstanding.I have now facilitated several offsites company-wide and gained my popularity in doing so from Ed Rose's book!Sincerely, honestly.The interactive exercises he shares with you as areader are excellent.I have received nothing but commendable feedbackafter each of my offsites when using his ideas.I highly recommend thisbook to those of you who facilitate annual offsites for your work teams. There is something in this book for every group and all team dynamics. This book will show you how to have a great time (lots of laughs and smilesand bonding) while really engraving a strong, memorable message in each andevery persons head!My copy is lent out to people company-wide all thetime.Trust me, this book is a keeper! Thank you Ed for writing such avalueable resource for us team-leaders!!!I truly appreciate your qualitybook.

  "50 Ways..." is a must for team trainers
  Another great training resource from Ed Rose working with Steve Buckley. Practical exercises, well described, well illustrated, and full of additional trainer insights. ... Read more

Book Description

o

Details specific tactics and techniques for using influence rather than coercion to accomplish your goals
o Includes exercises for charting your progress and planning a personal influence strategy
o Uses case studies and anecdotes from the author’s twenty years of consulting experience to show how to make influence work for you Experienced organizational consultant Alan Vengel teaches you the influence skills you need to enlist the cooperation of others, inside and outside the organization, to achieve your professional goals. Vengel offers tips for successful influence in real business situations, showing how to influence without authority, sell your ideas, and buildbetter relationships. This book will help you to get results faster and move people to action by using a systematic step-by-step approach. ... Read more

Reviews (7)

The Influence Edge
This book provided me with a planning guide and influence strategies that I used to help me in a team meeting. I was able to gain agreement to get support I needed for my project. The information was great.

Influence - The Cutting Edge!
An excellent book, easy to read and understand. A book essential for any organization, big or small. It helps improve and streamline Internal Organizational Network. It provides step by step system to help in work situation. This is a tremendously helpful and eminently practical book. Alan Vengel teaches you the influence skills you need to enlist the cooperation of others, inside and outside the organization, to achieve your professional goals. Vengel offers tips for successful influence in real business situations. The techniques show how to influence without authority, sell your ideas, and build better relationships. The "push-pull energy" concept is impressive. Two very different ways of influencing people and mastering how to influence when and how. The exercises throughout the book definitely show you how to use it to design a very sophisticated and effective influence strategy. Master the artful skill of influence and adopt the techniques in a unique fashion. Its the Time factor and thought management to apply and sure, achievements drive your way to influence and reach your goals.
Afterall, Influence makes a Big Difference in Life! So cut the Edge and there, you reach the goals!

Very Practical
It's really taught me how to handle a very difficult person and very difficult work situations. I highly recommend it for anyone dealing with the public.

Essential To Any Organization
This book is essential to any organization, big or small. The author uses a logical, simple, yet very powerful step by step system to help anyone in any work situation. A very easy and effective way to increase cooperation from others. The exercises and hands-on applications really helped to further solidify what I had read and allowed me to develop my own personal strategical way of increasing influence. I highly recommened this book to those interested in improving and streamlining internal organizational networks.

Learn When to Push and When to Pull
This is a tremendously helpful and eminently practical book. I was especially impressed by the concept of "push-pull energy", the idea that there are two very different ways of influencing people and that you need to know when and how to use each one, or when to combine them. (Basically, push energy is assertive and pull energy is inclusive, i.e. pulling people in). It's a subtle concept but the exercises throughout the book show you how to use it to design a very sophisticated and effective influence strategy. ... Read more

Book Description

Technological advances and changes in the global economy are increasing the geographic distribution of work in industries as diverse as banking, wine production, and clothing design. Many workers communicate regularly with distant coworkers; some monitor and manipulate tools and objects at a distance. Work teams are spread across different cities or countries. Joint ventures and multiorganizational projects entail work in many locations. Two famous examples--the Hudson Bay Companys seventeenth-century fur trading empire and the electronic community that created the original Linux computer operating system--suggest that distributed work arrangements can be flexible, innovative, and highly successful. At the same time, distributed work complicates workers professional and personal lives. Distributed work alters how people communicate and how they organize themselves and their work, and it changes the nature of employee-employer relationships.

This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of distributed work groups and organizations, the challenges inherent in distributed work, and ways to make distributed work more effective. Specific topics include division of labor, incentives, managing group members, facilitating interaction among distant workers, and monitoring performance. The final chapters focus on distributed work in one domain, collaborative scientific research. The contributors include psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and computer scientists. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Face-to-Face versus On-Line Work
"The Place of Face-to-Face Communication in Distributed Work"
Bonnie A. Nardi, Agilent Technologies; Steve Whittaker, AT&T Labs-Research

This chapter is significant. There is a wealth of knowledge and understanding that can be brought to on-line business collaboration from fields like anthropology. This is particularly important given the notable failure of many on-line collaboration efforts.

What intrigues me about the work are the larger questions that emerge - what does this mean for the meaning and quality of business life, the effectiveness of on-line work, work/life balance, alienation/mental health, etc. For example, what will the quality of our ideas be like is we work more and more on-line? If we work in isolated, on-line environments how does this impact our need to "be" as social beings and learn informally with others around the coffee pot? What if the on-line "coffee pot" can never be as rich as the real thing? ... Read more

Book Description

Dozens of customizable performance improvement tools

Mel Silberman's bestselling books on "Active Training" have sold more than 68,000 copies. In The Active Manager's Tool Kit, Silberman takes his trademarked approach to "Active Training" and applies it to "Active Managing." Instead of telling employees what to do and sitting back to wait for results, "active managers" conduct team building, motivate, coach, and guide their direct reports to be self-directing, accountable, and team oriented.

The Active Manager's Tool Kit is full of work sheets and reproducible tools that can be downloaded from the Web and customized or photocopied. These include reproducible job aids for employees, performance improvement activities that managers can use to train their own teams, and questionnaires that help both manager and employees assess how well they are doing. The tools in this book enable the "active manager" to coach and lead effectively.

Reviews (1)

Finally - a leadership book you can really use on the job!
Many leadership books are on the market with excellent concepts and theories, but the great thing about this book is that it contains real tools, assessments, and ideas any manager can download and actually use immediately to assess their own skills or to use as team activities with their employees. This book is great for those who continually work to develop their leadership skills, but is especially excellent for managers who "don't have time for leadership classes", because they can use the activities on their own with their team during staff meetings, or as "just-in-time" tools as they are needed to help employees deal with change, etc. This is also an excellent resource for those in the HR/leadership development field - the tools can be used on a 1-on-1 basis with a manager, or they could be used within a leadership course. ... Read more

Book Description

Know how and when to intervene in a functioning group

Finally, a functional guide that focuses on putting the concept of group-process consultation into actual practice! You'll learn how and under what circumstances a process consultant should intervene to make a group's work more effective. Plus, this guide shows you how to help groups identify, diagnose, and resolve problems as they occur! Be an effective process consultant?this handbook helps you:

• Determine the appropriate type and depth of an intervention
• Realize the competencies required of the group-process consultant
• View the role, future, and ethical considerations of group-process consultation

You'll get many real-world examples of how to make critical group concepts work. And you'll get responses to commonly asked questions from working group-process consultants. Intervention Skills is a much-needed guide for the professional consultant, as well as a useful resource for anyone who plays a role in the workings of a small group.

Find out why the first printing ot this classic sold out in two weeks! Read this book and make your next group intervention more potent and effective! ... Read more

Book Description

As the tides of all the trendy business initiatives from the last twenty years have all disappeared, one concept has remained in their wake and continues to thrive today: team strategies. When implemented correctly, the results are impressive.Organizations—whether they are corporations or ministries—have successfully developed team strategies and are now experiencing significant increases in productivity and services.

Team resource expert Pat MacMillan discusses the characteristics of a high performance team and how to implement a new paradigm of leadership to bring any organization to greater efficiency. ... Read more

Reviews (7)

Great Book! Great Wisdom!
Pat MacMillan is one of the top consultants in the USA to Fortune 500 businesses and non-profit organizations. In this book he gave me, for under $20, thousands of dollars of help for my own personal "team building" challenges, and those of my own consulting clients.

Unlike some business books, this one is readable and helpful at the *personal* as well as the organizational level. There is, quite simply, a truck-load of wisdom and counsel in this book.

Joe B. Webb, President
Webb & Associates

No Other Book Like It!
This book on teams is the best I have ever seen on the subject. The author retells the story of United Flight 232 throughout the book to make his points. It brings the principles to life in a very real life way. The "team wheel" and the chapters on the qualities of a high performance team are worth the price of the book alone.

This book would be of real value to anyone leading a team. It would be an especially good resource for consultants as well. Lots of graphs and diagnostic tools make the book feel like a library of resources.

On a personal note, there is a lot you can apply to any set of relationships where you are on a team. I learned a lot about being a husband and dad just reading it!

Create Synergy
For the past 2 years, I have used Pat MacMillan's principles to impact organization's greatest assets, their people. The Performance Factor is the heart of these principles and I have watched as organizations applied them. Synergy was created, i.e. 1+1= 3,4,5. These principles work, regardless of what culture you are in, for I have taught them in North America, UK, Asia, South East Asia and Thailand. It is simply the best investment you will ever make for the success of your organization.

Finally, a team model that really makes sense!
MacMillan has demystified what it takes to turn a group of people into a high-performance team. In recent years, much has been written on the topic of teams, and much has been done to implement team structures in organizations of all kinds. But until now, nowhere have the factors underlying effective teams and teamwork been woven together so sensibly as they have been in The Performance Factor. MacMillan's team model is elegantly simple in concept, yet significantly robust in its logic. The Performance Factor not only lays out the 6 components needed to produce high performance teams, the pieces are linked together in such way that it is simple to see how each component relates to the others. In addition, MacMillan provides many examples from the real world to show clearly the realities and challenges facing groups who choose to emotionally invest in true teamwork. The book is incredibly rich with details and practical advice, and so readable that I found myself feeling as though I was having a private conversation with the author.

MacMillan gives team leadership particular attention because leadership is such a critical part of any team's success. At the end of each chapter is a "Message to Team Leaders", words of wisdom dedicated to helping team leaders fully understand their roles and responsibilities. An aspect of the "Messages" that I found particularly noteworthy was the recurring emphasis on service to team members and team purpose, a critical behavior required of truly effective team leaders.

I suspect that most who read "The Performance Factor" will ultimately read it more than once, and that those who are really serious about wanting to promote the 'exceptional' results, achievable only through truly high-performance teams, will keep the book close at hand for ready reference.

The Performance Factor: Unlocking the Secrets of
Whether an organzation is doubling or downsizing, the synergy that comes from high performance teams is critical to success in a marketplace that doesn't give a lot of second chances. Pat MacMillan's The Performance Factor presents a guide to developing high performance teams and team leaders that is both profound and practical. With the right blend of principle and practice, this book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what teamwork and leadership are all about in the real world. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Author's comments
Has your company moved from traditional work groups to a team format? Is it contemplating such a move? Over 80 percent of Fortune 500 firms already are using teams as all or part of their organizational structure. Nobody know how many less well known companies are following suit.

The Complete Idiots Guide to Team Building will teach you the tools and techniques needed to be a successful team leader. It will enable those with previous supervisory experience to become aware of the changes they must make in management style to succeed in their new roles and what they must do to implement them. It will also prepare newly appointed leaders to move rapidly into productive leadership.

Not only team leaders, but also all team members can benefit from reading this book. Why? In many teams, members assume sub-team or project leadership from time to time. In addition, more and more organizations are turning to self-directed teams -- teams that have no permanent leader. All members are expected to be ready to lead a project.

This book is not an academic treatise, but a pragmatic guide to team leadership than can be immediately applied on the job. Read it to become acquainted with the many facets of team leadership. Keep this book handy to refer to when special problems arise.

Whether you are an experienced team leader, starting your first job, or you are preparing for promotion, this book will serve as a road map to successful leadership.

Great book, but not what I was looking for...
This book is honest, entertaining, and jam-packed with great ideas, helpful hints, and how-to's. There is information about everything from reasons for using teams in the workplace, to forming strong ones, to helping yours become more successful. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know anything about working in teams!

Unfortunately, although this book was loaded with so much good stuff, it still didn't have what I wanted. I work in student affairs at a college, and I was looking for a book with activities on team-building to use with student groups. If this is what you're looking for, don't buy this book!

This book has some great stuff for anyone who works with teams, but be careful not to expect any more than concepts and explanations...no activities. ... Read more

Book Description

In the ever-changing world of work, the idea of spending some or all of your time working in teams is becoming more and more common. From solving problems, to tackling projects, to providing organizational leadership, the roles and importance of teams continue to grow. Leading a team is no easy job, but when a team gels, they can far outperform traditional work groups.

Managing Teams For Dummies is for anyone who has been asked to take on the role of team leader. This book can help you manage your team, whether you’re a senior manager or worker who doesn’t have supervisory responsibilities, but has become the point person on a specific project.

Managing Teams For Dummies can help you build and lead high-performing teams. Packed with tips on setting and reaching goals, resolving conflicts, leading teams through change, and providing team members with the skills to work together productively, this book will help you keep any team you mange focused and efficient. Managing Teams For Dummies will also:

• Take you beyond the conceptual idea of teams and provide practical advice for developing groups that become winning teams
• Describe the type of leadership needed to guide teams successfully and prepare you for challenges that arise
• Reveal the three cornerstones’ model for developing team success and provide how-to strategies to make them happen
• Discuss the types of teams that are growing in popularity, namely self-directed teams, project teams, and task teams

Book Description

Filling the need for a "how-to," step-by-step guide to strategic planning, Strategic Action Planning NOW! outlines team-based planning in four steps.Gate Gable's techniques provide detailed guidance into planning processes, strategic skills, recognition of challenges, consideration of goals, monitoring and measurement, and implementation tips to help the reader begin the planning process almost immediately.Written in three parts, the author provides exercises with each chapter. Part one covers the pre-planning stages, definingwho and what your team is and what your teams' goals are. The second part goes over the actual planning, identifying the challenges and setting the goals for your team. The third and final part deals with post planning, implementation and evaluating your team's progress. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

An important skill shared with enjoyable style...
If you think reading this book will be a chore - you are mistaken. The writing style is enjoyable; and the analogies and examples of the various planning steps make the task of strategic planning seem effortless.

An engaging, useable guide! Helpful and practical.
Strategic Action Planning NOW! provides a mix of practical suggestions, real-life examples, and inspiring ideas to jump-start and guide the planning process. Gable's style is conversational and encouraging. I especially appreciated the step-by-step planning exercises: they allowed us to use the information right away. ... Read more

Book Description

This comprehensive introduction to the field represents the best of the published literature on groupware and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). The papers were chosen for their breadth of coverage of the field, their clarity of expression and presentation, their excellence in terms of technical innovation or behavioral insight, their historical significance, and their utility as sources for further reading.Taken as a whole, the papers and their introductions are a complete sourcebook to the field.

This book will be useful for computer professionals involved in the development or purchase of groupware technology as well as for researchers and managers.It should also serve as a valuable text for university courses on CSCW, groupware, and human-computer interaction.

Book Description

Never shall I fail my comrades. I will always keep myself mentally alert, physically strong, and morally straight and I will shoulder more than my share of the task, whatever it may be. One hundred percent and then some.

—excerpt from the Ranger Creed

The Army Rangers are known for their solid teamwork, single-minded pursuit of a goal, and commitment to excellence. In Rangers Lead the Way, authors Dean Hohl and Maryann Karinch show how you can adapt the Rangers’ principles of leadership and teamwork to the workplace—and generate incredible results.

By implementing the successful philosophy behind America’s most elite military regime, you can:

·Create a corporate vision
·Establish a successful manager/leader dichotomy
·Identify friends and foes within your organization
·Stay a step ahead of the competition
·Maximize time and resources
·Accomplish goals faster and more effectively

Rangers Lead the Way shows you how to instill the values, lessons, and insights that are essential to helping your team survive, thrive, and triumph over the competition. ... Read more

Reviews (3)

Insightful!
As an Army Ranger, Dean Hohl endured Ranger School, in which he was forced to figure out how to survive 14 days in the woods with only 14 meals. He later parachuted into Panama during the U.S. invasion. Now a consultant who leads corporate types through Ranger-style boot camps, Hohl and co-author Maryann Karinch make a convincing case that business leaders can benefit from the same type of training Rangers are given. Organizations need leaders who are flexible and communicative, he argues in an engaging and illustrative way. Hohl resists the temptation to dwell too much on his own war stories, although at times he'd do well to rely more on his experiences and less on bloodless summaries of corporate problems seemingly parroted from the business press. We recommend this book to any manager who leads or works with a team. If you wish that your team could act like a Ranger platoon, start reading.

Ranger Principles DO Lead The Way
This is a very insightful publication. It shows you how to create an action plan and how to follow through with it, all the while using your team mates' various personality types to the team's advantage. Dean has the ability to speak on every man's level and often uses his own real life Ranger experiences to demonstrate the principles he teaches-extremely effective. I have given copies of this book out to my co-workers and friends with great excitement of what they will learn from it.

Insightful!
As an Army Ranger, Dean Hohl endured Ranger School, in which he was forced to figure out how to survive 14 days in the woods with only 14 meals. He later parachuted into Panama during the U.S. invasion. Now a consultant who leads corporate types through Ranger-style boot camps, Hohl and co-author Maryann Karinch make a convincing case that business leaders can benefit from the same type of training Rangers are given. Organizations need leaders who are flexible and communicative, he argues in an engaging and illustrative way. Hohl resists the temptation to dwell too much on his own war stories, although at times he'd do well to rely more on his experiences and less on bloodless summaries of corporate problems seemingly parroted from the business press. We recommend this book to any manager who leads or works with a team. If you wish that your team could act like a Ranger platoon, start reading. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A TREASURE TROVE OF TEAM BUILDING TOOLS!
This is a highly useful book that presents forty training and development tools, arranged in eight process stages covering initiating cross-functional teams, developing synergy and consensus, creatively solving problems, and recognizing and rewarding teams. The author describes the functions and methods for implementation of each tool, along with an illustration. Lots of illustrations and charts. A solid team-building resource. Reviewed by Yvette Borcia, co-founder, Stern & Associates, co-author of Stern's Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and Stern's Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Good review and helpful assessments
Read this for an MA course entitled "Team Leadership for Organizational Optimization." Nothing new but it's an easy read and Quick offers good insights and many helpful assessments. This book could be used as a helpful maintenance check for leaders and team members.

Easy to Use and Read
I do employee development and motivation seminars. I needed a book to help managers understand how and why a team is more effective than other management practices. This book gets to the point and easy to read. I use the assessments in the book and found they are very helpful to my clients. I plan on buying a copy for each of my participants. ... Read more

Book Description

Geographically dispersed work groups--virtual teams--must work well together without the advantage of meeting face-to-face. This leading-edge book provides strategies for effective team leadership, and includes exercises, case studies, and models to give readers a jump-start on the future of teamwork. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Good for the Tool Kit, but not a Stand-Alone Source
I found Hartzler & Henry's book to be a very good set of tools for leaders and members of virtual project teams. The content and exercises it includes are forthright and practical, and flow from good grounded theory and practical experience. It is published by the American Society for Quality, and so has a practical, quality & numbers bent.

The drawback to the book, as I read it, was that it is a specialized book. It addresses project teams. It does not address leadership issues, technology, or ongoing (versus project-based) virtual teaming in any great detail. My partner found the text to be a little simplistic, but I felt that the writing level was clear and appropriate for technical project managers. I would not recommend it as a primer on virtual teams for executives. ;-)

Recommendation: Buy it for your tool kit, but don't make it the only book on virtual teams you use. The authors have done a very good job on the topic they wanted to cover.

an essential for managers, consultants
This book does a great job of providing tools and methods that are grounded in solid theory. ... Read more

Book Description

100's of solutions to commom work team problems! Enough has been written about the benefits of self-directed work teams. Now day-to-day problems inherent in trying to make a group of people work like one need to be solved-and quickly. Tips for Teams: A Ready Reference for Solving Common Team Problems, by Kimball Fisher and the consultants at Belgard*Fisher*Raynor, takes the 100 most common team problems and puts 3-5 tested, ready-to-use solutions for each in yur hands. You'll also find a huge resource of techniques and strategies for working together in ways that avoid problems right from the start. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A useful tool for leaders
This is a reference guide to common teams problems written in a very simple, comprehensive language. I found it easy to find the problem I face with and need to get an advice about. Most of the suggestions presented by the authors can be put in practice right away. I recommend this book to those leaders that need a quick approach to team problems and don't have enough time to research in long and broad text books. ... Read more

Book Description

"Finally, a book that goes beyond the 'how-to' of team building and answers the critical question, 'How do I create a collaborative organization that reaps the harvest of long-term investment in teams?' The 'ten principles of collaborative organizations' outlined in this book are invaluable."
— Seth McCutcheon, CEO, Domicile Design Group LLC

The flagship book for the new Collaborative Work Systems Series, Beyond Teams provides an overview of this growing field, defines the basic principles, and points the direction toward a series of books. You'll find a framework designed to help you understand the potential and the means of achieving it throughout the key functions of business. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Great addition to your OD/OB toolbox
"Beyond Teams" is an excellent reference for anyone interested in charting or changing results in their collaborative networks. From the standpoint of anyone involved in Organizational Behavior/Organizational Development, from manager, practitioner, academic, consultant or team member, this book provides many useful insights and has the feel of actual fieldwork used in its writing. The book is laid out in such a manner that it can be applied in any given situation. The ten guiding principles are structured and repeated in various collaborative work settings consistently. This allows the reader to apply the principles in their unique setting. The ten guiding principles are then explained for each general situation with a short description given for when the principles are not working and, more importantly, when they are working. Too often in this field books are written from a purely academic viewpoint or "this is how you fix it" approach. This book is different in that you can sense the fieldwork in the research and you see how things are supposed to work as well as when they are not working. This gives the reader the option of working on a group's deficiencies while complementing their achievements. This book is a "must have" for anyone interested in improving team communications. ... Read more

Book Description

By increasing productivity, lowering costs and building employee satisfaction, teams have become a powerful vehicle for transforming the workplace. But why do so many teams falter after starting out so promising? Keeping Teams On Track takes an in-depth look at what happens to teams after the launch. Written by acknowledged leaders in organizational consultation and based on extensive research and experience, the book explores the workings of the team culure and how it differs from a standard organization. The authors review common problems that are likely to surface as team members struggle to define themselves and function within the new management paradigm, and they offer practical solutions that will help teams endure over the long term. Keeping Teams on Track examines several organizations' successful transitions to teams. By focusing on the best practices of these organizations, Keeping Teams on Track helps readers understand how to maintain successful teams. This guide discusses key issues all teams face, including: The reasons teams struggle; The challenges facing organizations when implementing teams; Tools and techniques for nurturing maturing teams. ... Read more

Book Description

Generating and implementing ideas are cornerstones for a wide variety of quality improvement techniques - and the primary activities for any project team. The Basics of Idea Generation is a cost-effective way to ensure your team consistently generates new ideas and learns how to implement them with this proven five-step process:

Step One: Create an opportunity statement.
Step Two: Collect the raw materials.
Step Three: Hold an idea workout.
Step Four: Evaluate the ideas.
Step Five: Implement the ideas.

The author explains 20 tools that help complete each step in the process. In addition, you'll learn solutions to overcoming certain barriers to creativity. ... Read more

Book Description

Now anyone can develop and lead a successful team with these experiential activities!

25 Activities For Teams is a useful collection of activities and assessment tools for leading and developing high-performing work teams. Designed to complement the popular How to Lead Work Teams, this resource can also stand alone to help team leaders get everyone actively involved in the team's development.

25 Activities For Teams is a valuable resource that promotes fun, experiential, team learning. Best of all, it can be used by even novice team leaders and facilitators or by professional trainers. This collection brings together exercises from a variety of resources that will help teams develop skills, build cohesiveness, and accomplish important tasks.

Reinforcing Fran Rees' LEAD model, the activities in this book will help the team leader:

• Lead with a clear purpose
• Empower participants
• Aim for consensus
• Direct the process

Team leaders will use this practical resource to energize team meetings and keep them on track for maximum results.

... Read more

Book Description

Traditional forms of collaboration are not sufficient for competing effectively in the more complex and dynamic environment of today’s business world. Face-to-face meetings between people of similar backgrounds have given way to increasingly complex working relationships. Organizations must be able to gain rapid access to knowledgeable people to meet constantly changing conditions and demands. More fluid, flexible, and easily reconfigurable collaborative relationships are necessary to produce the innovations that can make or break organizations¾even entire industries¾ and provide the opportunities that attract the talented and motivated employees who will make the difference between success and failure.

Business Without Boundaries helps managers address these challenges. The authors explore a number of wide-ranging, real-world cases to identify hands-on principles for successful collaboration. They offer managers and executives practical steps and tools for creating, facilitating, and supporting complex collaborations throughout their organizations. And they explain how to “team” across boundaries in the new global economy. The recommendations are specific enough to apply to particular forms of complex collaboration (for example supply chains, global product development teams, interorganizational alliances) but general enough to apply to new forms that have yet to emerge. ... Read more