Smart Teams, 2nd Edition

Smart Teams, 2nd Edition

by Dermot Crowley
Released July 2023
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781394191307

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Book description

Learn how your team can communicate, congregate and collaborate more effectively than ever

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to build a culture where productivity thrives. This book shows you how to turn around the unproductive team behaviours that create friction. You’ll learn the ‘superproductive’ behaviours that promote flow and the most impactful productivity principles for working better together. Smart Teams shares the practical guidelines and key skills you need to lead a productive, cooperative team.

Email noise, unproductive meetings and poorly organised projects can stifle creativity and disrupt everyone’s workflow. A culture that isn’t productive results in long hours, more stress, and a lack of balance. But by raising awareness of how our behaviours impact our work and our colleagues, you build the desire and capability to change within your team. This book is packed with tips, guidelines and expert insights for leaders and managers at any level.

  • Foster a culture of ‘superproductivity’
  • Create a set of Smart Team principles to guide cooperation
  • Run fewer, shorter and more effective meetings
  • Collaborate more productively on projects
  • Reduce urgency, interruptions and email noise

People want their work to matter, they want to make an impact and they want to do it all with a healthy work-life balance. Productivity is the key to making it all happen! Smart Teams shows you how to implement the culture shift that will allow your team to flourish.

This book is part of the Smart Productivity series, helping readers find practical solutions for better managing their time, energy and focus.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. About the author
  5. Acknowledgements
  6. How to use this book
  7. Introduction
    1. Can you relate?
    2. Productivity problems at the team level
    3. We create friction rather than flow
  8. PART I: Moving from friction to flow
    1. Are you selfish?
    2. Are you selfless?
    3. Or do you serve?
    4. CHAPTER 1: Enabling productive flow
      1. Productivity friction
      2. Poor productivity behaviours
      3. Friction vs flow cultures
      4. Beyond personal productivity
      5. Level 1: DISRUPTIVE
      6. Level 2: PASSIVE
      7. Level 3: PRODUCTIVE
      8. Level 4: COLLABORATIVE
      9. Level 5: SUPERPRODUCTIVE
    5. CHAPTER 2: Qualities of a smart team
      1. We are purposeful
      2. We are mindful
      3. We are punctual
      4. We are reliable
    6. CHAPTER 3: Changing team behaviours
      1. Get specific to change behaviours
      2. What is a productivity principle?
      3. Generating principles for your team
      4. Flipping problems into principles
      5. Make this a priority for your team
  9. PART II: Working better together
    1. Why this?
    2. Why them?
    3. Why now?
    4. Why here?
    5. CHAPTER 4: Communicate: make less noise
      1. Email overload
      2. Alternatives to email
      3. Four communication tools
      4. A more thoughtful approach to communications
      5. Planning effective communications (why)
      6. Writing effective communications (what)
      7. Sending effective communications (who)
      8. Noise reduction strategies
    6. CHAPTER 5: Congregate: make meetings count
      1. What's wrong with our meeting culture?
      2. Let's aim for 100 per cent fewer meetings
      3. 25 per cent fewer meetings
      4. 25 per cent shorter meeting durations
      5. 25 per cent fewer participants
      6. 25 per cent less time wasted
      7. Make your meetings more effective
      8. Running an awesome meeting
      9. Mindful interruptions
      10. Are all agenda items the same?
      11. Focus your meeting with an agenda
      12. Make online meetings work
    7. CHAPTER 6: Collaborate: make projects great
      1. Alignment, agreement and awareness
      2. Project collaboration: make them visible
      3. The best tool for the job
    8. CHAPTER 7: Key skills for effective cooperation
      1. Managing urgency
      2. Developing an active mindset
      3. Negotiating our workloads
      4. Delegating in the right way
  10. PART III: Building a smart team culture
    1. CHAPTER 8: Creating a more productive culture
      1. Create ripples
      2. The role of leadership on this journey
    2. CHAPTER 9: Some productivity projects
      1. Project 1: Productivity principles
      2. Project 2: Interruption reduction
      3. Project 3: Dial down the urgency
      4. Project 4: Meeting diet
      5. Project 5: Meeting agenda
      6. Project 6: Turn down the noise
      7. Project 7: Pull versus push
      8. Project 8: The projects project
  11. Postscript
  12. End User License Agreement

Product information

  • Title: Smart Teams, 2nd Edition
  • Author(s): Dermot Crowley
  • Release date: July 2023
  • Publisher(s): Wiley
  • ISBN: 9781394191307