Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190840 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780471382546
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From the Inside Flap
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 and virtual 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.

From the Back Cover
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.

Customer Reviews

When and How to Use Teams Versus Single Leaders
The Discipline of Teams updates and extends the best-seller, The Wisdom of Teams. "The most important characteristic of teams is discipline; not bonding, togetherness, or empowerment." You are encouraged to be sure that you use teams only when they make sense as a performance unit, rather than having a single-leader approach. Using sophisticated Marine units as models, you begin to appreciate that some tasks are better suited to individuals and some tasks need to combine team and individual elements. In fact, complex tasks may require many teams focusing on subtasks. The book also looks at virtual teams and the impact of electronic communications on teams (concluding that nothing really changes -- you just have more ways to communicate and face-to-face is still important).

A team makes sense when you need to accomplish something more than what individual performances will give you. A good example comes in new product development. Each specialist can do a good job, and the project can easily be a bust. By thinking together, potential failure can become success by tweaking each perspective in new ways. The authors also point out that many times goals are set that sound like individual performance, but better goals would set directions requiring a team.

An effective team needs to have:

(1) an understandable charter

(2) communicate and coordinate effectively

(3) have clear roles and responsibilities for individuals

(4) use time-efficient processes and

(5) have a sense of accountability.

"Whenever a small group can deliver performance through the combined sum of individual contributions, then the single-leader discipline is the most effective choice."

The book provides many ways to make both teams and single-leader groups work better. In fact, it focuses on those areas that are most likely to cause problems, like poorly defined goals, keeping the size of the group as small as possible, not having the skills needed, time pressures, and using the wrong leadership discipline). I also liked the fact that the book looked at the question of when you should fold a team.

The authors clearly understand a great deal about making teams more effective, and anyone can learn from this book. I think those who liked The Wisdom of Teams will find it to be a useful refresher with some valuable new material.

The book contains many exercises and workbook questions that I happily endorse. They make the book much more practical and useful. If you just did the exercises and the workbook questions, this would be a five star book. The explanations are just icing on the cake.

After you have finished this book, I also suggest you think about whether you have set the right priorities in your organization. Realizing that you can only do a few things at once, what should they be? Be sure to give yourself a chance to pick tasks that will benefit from teams.

Find ways to make human cooperation more beneficial . . . for that's our strength!

Discipline of Teams
As the sequel to The Wisdom of Teams, John Katzenbach and Douglas Smith return to uncover the tools, techniques, frameworks and disciplines required to unlock the performance potential that lie within today's teams and virtual teams.

Performance potential is not guaranteed, and you need to become an expert at the two disciplines - team and single leader and, you must be able to implement the right discipline to suit the performance need of your team.

Katzenbach & Smith identify and discuss the Six Basic Principles of Team Discipline: 1) keep team numbers to a minimum, 2) ensure that team members possess skills that compliment one another, 3) identify a clear performance purpose, 4) agree on outcome based goals, 5) provide clear roles and responsibilities and, 6) ensure mutual and individual accountability.

As a follow-up to their insights and strategies, Katzenbach and Smith provide practical exercises at the conclusion of each chapter for both team members and leaders to get them on the road to optimal performance.

The Discipline of Teams is easy to read and will provide the reader with tools, techniques and strategies to assist in becoming top performers within today's organizations. On a personal note, The Discipline of Teams provided me with some new techniques to help develop and maintain effective teams for today and in the future.

Nice overview, but lacks concrete guidance
This book excels at drawing the line between leader-driven and team-driven groups of individuals. It also characterizes some of the failure cases very well -- teams that are too large, teams that don't have a clear vision and purpose, teams that are disconnected from the rest of the organization, etc.

However, I struggled to see how to clearly draw the line between which style to guide your team into. The rough guidance seemed a bit self-referential: "when the task can best be done with a single leader, do it with a single leader." What about if you're not sure? Try both and take it as a lesson learned? Maybe I just missed it, but the book lacked the critial information I needed to be able to fully apply it in my situation.