Beyond Team Building

INTRODUCTION

To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.

—Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski

Teamwork is the hallmark of success in sports and in business. As Ken Blanchard once wrote: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Many books on teams and teamwork (including our own) focus on how to repair broken teams in which team members are not “acting as one.” But this book has a different purpose. We go beyond focusing on how to repair broken teams, and focus on how to create a “team building organization” that will foster an environment which will create and maintain great teams from the outset. (Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski's success is based on creating a set of processes and an environment that produces great teams from the outset, not just on fixing his teams when they aren't performing well.) And while we cover many topics from our previous books on team building, this book will give to you, the reader, a more succinct and clear description of how to create an effective team. You will also learn how to develop a “team building organization” that has systems and processes in place to regularly assess team performance for all teams in the organization and to help them improve. To do so, we take a broader view about what team building is and should mean for managers, team leaders, and team members.

This book is for anyone interested in improving team performance. While most of our examples are from teams in businesses, the team ...