The Team-Building Tool Kit, 2nd Edition

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CHAPTER

Getting Started

THE USE OF TEAMS as an organizational strategy to engage employees and improve productivity is now more than three decades old. In the early 1970s, the leadership of Gaines, a Topeka pet food plant, launched a novel experiment to transform its workplace into self-directed and cross-functional work teams when no one else was doing it.¹ The increases in productivity at Gaines caught the eye of other organizations and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, although many organizations have implemented components of teaming, they have yet to realize the full range of possible benefits. Some have simply changed the language ...