This is one of the best books I have read all year about leading teams -- much more useful than the last multi-week project management course I took!
I've worked in environments where strong team building was a priority and have always appreciated the extra effort made to organize team off-sites where everyone works together on many of the issues described in this book. Even though I am not leading team and my department is huge and geographically dispersed, I feel like there's a lot of material here that I can take away to help with my projects.
Similar to some of the recent books I have read ("Power of Habit", "Reprogram Your Weight" and even "Outliers") - there is discussion of the "Fundamental Attribute Error."
human beings tend to falsely attribute the negative behaviors of others to their character (an internal attribution), while they attribute their own negative behaviors to their environment (an external attribution).
That's a tremendous bit of human behavior that we should all keep in mind. It's something I constantly repeat when one of my friends gets mad at some behavior in traffic, for example, "That person probably wasn't thinking of you at all - they were just thinking of themselves." It's NOT personal.
My biggest takeaways from this book are around meetings and metrics for success. Even if I do not (currently) find myself in a position to organize and lead a team offsite based on the information in this book (wish we could do that!), there are some really great concepts I can apply.
First - meetings. Boring meetings where everyone agrees or some people don't talk or where nobody comes to "consensus" indicate a lack of clarity of purpose, perhaps even the wrong people in the meeting and worse, the "ultimate penalty of boring meetings is bad decisions, not to mention wasted time."
It is important to get buy in at the beginning of the meeting or discussion - raise the anxiety a bit. This isn't just a status meeting -- let's have a meeting to commit to an decision that is important because it affects some goal that we all care about. Status can happen in e-mail or on the wiki.
Second, the author stresses the difference between "consensus" and "commitment" -- one of the key qualities of leadership in moving forward to a goal is getting people to commit, "buying in to decisions when the “right” answer seems nowhere to be found."
Further, "Good leaders drive commitment among the team by first extracting every possible idea, opinion, and perspective from the team" and then step up and make a decision. NB: commitment cannot happen if there is not perfect clarity - and that's where "cascading communication" comes into play. Recap "what did we decide here today?" in the meeting, and then send it out in e-mail, and make sure the team members communicate it to their staff right away.
One of the tips in this book is to start a meeting with a "lightning round," allowing "no more than thirty seconds to update the team about their three top priorities that week." Another excellent tip is to track progress against specific goals and objectives -- so that the team can stay on track and ensure that decisions around changes in scope or priority are measured against those objectives.
Finally - the author makes it clear that building a good team requires commitment to process and is like a marriage, it happens over time. Being able to build trust on a team, using inquiry to hear all the ideas, making decisions based on specific goals -- these all can help a team make better decisions and be more effective & efficient.
The last section of the book provides an outline of the itinerary and directions for different exercises - pretty high level but still appears to be a very useful tool for managing a team building offsite. I'll definitely keep this in my back pocket for future reference and recommend it to anyone who works on a team of any type!
Author website with tools & resources: https://www.tablegroup.com/teamwork
REVIEW: Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators (J-B Lencioni Series) by Patrick Lencioni
RATING: 5-stars
© Jennifer R Clark. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt this content with proper attribution.
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