Building Team Power: How to Unleash the Collaborative Genius of Teams for Increased Engagement, Productivity, and Results - Hardcover

Kayser, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071746749 ISBN 13: 9780071746748

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2011

Synopsis

Building Team Power is a hands-on, how-to book. It is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-your-hands-dirty book. It is applications oriented all the way. Don't look for complex psychological, sociological or academic group theory models here. You won't find any. Building Team Power extends and expands the reach of my well-received Mining Group Gold book. This one digs into the crucial behaviors you need to understand and practice to be a collaborative leader. It takes you into the "how-tos" for building collaborative partnerships and facilitating teamwork within your own work group, across work groups, or in task forces, committees, problem-solving teams, executive councils, and the like. It is one thing to say, "We need more and better collaboration around here;" it is another thing to do it. This book fills a void because it shows you how to do it in terms you can understand, with skills you can actually put into practice! Skill improvement in building and facilitating collaborative partnerships and teamwork is what this book teaches.

After reading Building Team Power, you will, I hope, pick out a few collaborative leadership actions and get started by saying: "Hey, I can give these a try because I understand what I am supposed to do. Kayser's book taught me something."

About this title

From the Publisher:

Tom Kayser, author of Mining Group Gold (3rd edition), is the president of Kayser Associates, Inc., a human resources consulting firm. For 30 years he worked for the Xerox Corporation, where he helped create and implement the Xerox worldwide Total Quality strategy, Leadership Through Quality, that led to Xerox being awarded the esteemed Malcolm Baldrige Award. Tom is an expert in organizational behavior and change, group facilitation, team-building design, and executive coaching. Tom also speaks at many universities and professional organizations.

From the Author:

THE NEED FOR THIS BOOK.  After the publication and favorable reception accorded the three editions of my first book, Mining Group Gold: How to Cash in on the Collaborative Brain Power of a Team for Innovation and Results (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1990, 1995, 2011), and the popularity of the first edition of Building Team Power (Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin, 1994), I knew I was on to something that went beyond casual interest.

My 30 years of experience at Xerox leading and facilitating every possible type of organization effectiveness intervention, my debates with colleagues both inside and outside of Xerox, my interactions with clients as part of my current consulting practice, my discussions with my wife, Carol, who has worked with a number of school districts and industrial firms teaching and applying collaborative principles, along with my review of the business literature, all have validated the same thing time after time.

New and experienced managers alike lack the necessary mental maps, the keen understanding, and the crisp fundamentals for being a collaborative leader building collaborative partnerships within and across teams.

New managers most often do not have this know-how simply because of their managerial inexperience. Many experienced managers, on the other hand, lack collaborative skills and insights because they grew up in the centralized, command-and-control bureaucracy where large merit increases, promotions, bonuses, lavish offices, and other forms of reward and recognition went to those managers who were best at dictating and directing. In those order-giving organizations, nurturing collaboration and teamwork was not a highly valued managerial behavior. Because it was looked upon as being soft and weak, as well as a sure-fire career killer, skill development in building and facilitating collaborative partnerships was squashed.

While this medieval thinking still exists in many places today, you can no longer allow it to predominate and drive your company's culture. If your organization does not understand or believe in utilizing the power of collaboration--or dismisses it as some passing fad--you are riding down the same highway to marketplace failure or irrrelevancy as ___________________(fill in the blank).

Figuring out ways to do things right the first time, every time; creating products and services that delight your customers and distress your competitors; forming and implementing strategies and structures to capture and hold market share; and studying and reconfiguring work processes to slice costs and improve quality are huge tasks requiring the collaborative genius of your entire organization. It is irrelevant whether your establishment is in the public sector or private sector, is a producer of goods or services, or is for profit or is nonprofit--a culture of collaboration up, down, sideways, and diagonally within and across every corner of your organization is mandatory for success in today's global marketplace. You cannot afford to have it any other way.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0071746749
• ISBN 13: 9780071746748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 304