How To Build High-Performance Teams

SELECTED READINGS

BEYOND TEAMWORK

CHRIS LEE

A potential customer approached a Wisconsin food-processing company with an offer to buy large quantities of the company’s product on a regular basis. This was an attractive proposition except for one problem: The company couldn’t handle the job with its existing production capacity.

Ordinarily, a CEO would consider the pros and cons of stretching production capacity, then bestow a decision on the employees. Instead, the president of this company called a meeting of all the team members—workers, that is—in the plant that would manufacture the product. He gave them every scrap of information about the situation that he possessed. He pointed out that to supply this large customer, the company would have ...