by Jon R. Katzenbach (Author), Douglas K. Smith (Author)
In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore the often counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams--such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility--and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development. The result is improved productivity and teams that can be counted on to deliver more than just the sum of their parts. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.
Front Jacket
They took the world by storm with The Wisdom of Teams, the overwhelmingly successful bestseller that was translated into fifteen languages and sold more than 400,000 copies worldwide. Now, the world's two leading authorities on teams and team dynamics join forces once again to help organizations large and small implement the disciplines, frameworks, tools, and techniques that raise small-group performance to a whole new level.
In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith present significant insights on team performance that they have gained in the near-decade since the publication of Wisdom. They explore the two critical disciplines that drive performance in small groups, providing concrete steps that groups can take to ensure the use of the right discipline at the right time. They also address new developments such as virtual teaming and global teaming that both amplify the importance of team performance and present new challenges to achieving it.
Providing detailed guidance and dozens of exercises that help reinforce team discipline, this mindbook-workbook helps small groups distinguish between outcome- and activity-based goals. It also provides the tools teams need to create and manage themselves according to a performance-based agenda. The authors detail the six basic principles of team discipline and offer guidance on applying these principles to team performance challenges.
An important additional purpose of this book is to help teams exploit the opportunities presented by modern communication technology to accomplish group work and performance-while illustrating how team discipline plays just as critical a role in the achievements of global andvirtual teams.
Performance is key to team success-and The Discipline of Teams provides the conceptual and practical guidance that will help any team in any organization set and achieve performance goals beyond their wildest dreams.
Back Jacket
Concepts, Principles, and Practical Techniques for Improving Small-Group Performance
The authors of the phenomenal bestseller, The Wisdom of Teams, are back. This time Jon Katzenbach and Doug Smith focus on the issues of small group discipline and performance and the challenges presented by revolutionary technologies that enable the creation of virtual teams and global teams.
The Discipline of Teams helps small groups implement the disciplines, frameworks, tools, and techniques that enable performance. With detailed guidance and dozens of indispensable exercises, they present a regimen proven to improve performance and help groups adhere to the Six Basic Principles of Team Discipline:
? Keep team membership small
? Ensure that members have complementary skills
? Develop a common purpose
? Set common goals
? Establish a commonly agreed upon working approach
? Integrate mutual and individual accountability
The Discipline of Teams is an indispensable resource for any small group in any organization that wants to raise the bar by setting and achieving more ambitious performance goals again and again.
Katzenbach and Smith's work on teams over the past decade has been called "essential," "path breaking," and "the best ever" by Business Week, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Leader to Leader, Fast Company, the Financial Times, and other publications around the world. Tens of thousands of teams, from the executive suite to the front lines, have applied the Katzenbach and Smith disciplines to increase the performance of their organizations and themselves.
Author Biography
Jon R. Katzenbach is a founder and co-leader of the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company, which focuses on cultural and leadership joint research within client situations. He has authored several articles and books, including The Wisdom of Teams and Leading Outside the Lines.
Douglas K. Smith is Chairman of the Board of The Rapid Results Institute as well as the author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me.