Creating Teams with an Edge (Harvard Business Essentials)
by Harvard Business School Press
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Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
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The basics of team-based work (2007-12-10)
This helpful guide from the Harvard Business Essentials Series will put you on the right track, whether you have just been assigned to a team or are considering forming a team to tackle a project. The writing is clear and concise, the advice is solid and the business principles are spot on. If you seek a guide about how to put a team together, get a project underway and manage it to fruition, you would be hard pressed to find better fundamental information in so few pages. We recommend this book to all aspiring team leaders, team members and managers.A solid and concise text and effective teams (2007-11-02)
This is a very solid guide from the folks at Harvard Business School Press that provides the basics of how to create, use, and manage teams. It opens with a discussion of what a team is and is not (workgroups are not teams, for example) and the kind of work that teams are best suited for. The book also lays out the essentials for creating a team and what kinds of things the company must provide for it to succeed. Too many companies form teams and then proceed to undermine their work every step of the way. So, if you are going to be responsible for a team, this material can be vital to you before you agree to head out into the wilderness of your project.
The information on how to form, constitute, and launch a team is terrific as is the advice supplied for the team manager. The first key is that the team leader is never to be in the “boss” role. The material provided on how to function as a team, how to work in a virtual team, and why you have to be a great team member to be an effective team leader is also very good.
This is a solid, concise, and basic text that can help anyone get their team off to a great start and to avoid most of the land mines as you do you work.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
The Art and Science of Effective Teamwork (2005-07-10)
This is one of the volumes in the new Harvard Business Essentials Series. Each offers authoritative answers to the most important questions concerning its specific subject. The material in this book is drawn from a variety of sources which include the Harvard Business School Press and the Harvard Business Review as well as Harvard ManageMentor®, an online service. I strongly recommend the official Harvard Business Essentials Web site (www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools) which offers free interactive versions of tools, checklists, and worksheets cited in this book and other books in the Essentials series. Each volume is indeed “a highly practical resource for readers with all levels of experience.” And each is by intent and in execution solution-oriented. Although I think those who have only recently embarked on a business career will derive the greatest benefit, the material is well-worth a periodic review by senior-level executives.
Credit Richard Luecke with pulling together a wealth of information and counsel from various sources. He is also the author of several other books in the Essentials series. In this instance, he was assisted by a subject advisor, Jeff Polzer, who is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. Together, they have carefully organized the material as follows.
Team Concepts: Understand These First
Essentials for an Effective Team: The Foundations of Success
Forming the Team: The Crew and Its Charter
Getting Off on the Right Foot: Important First Steps
Team Management Challenges: Where Leaders [and Leadership] Matter
Operating as a Team: Putting Ideas [and Insights] to Work
The Virtual Team: A Collaborative Challenge
Becoming a Team Player: Your Most Important Assignment
Please note the sequence of subjects addressed. Luecke and Polzer offer a step-by-step process which is cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective. Throughout their narrative, they provide an abundance of observations, suggestions, caveats, strategies, tactics, and checklists which really do comprise “the complete skill set to build powerful and influential teams.” Then in the three appendices, they provide useful implementation tools, a guide to effective coaching, and a “Troubleshooting Guide” because any human enterprise — especially one which requires effective cooperation, collaboration, and communication — is certain to encounter all manner of problems, especially when those initiatives challenge what Jim O’Toole has characterized as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”
This volume will be most valuable to decision-makers in those organizations (regardless of size or nature) which are either planning to respond to opportunities as well as problems by creating “a team with an edge,” or, are now thinking about doing so. I know of no other single volume which can be of greater assistance to those decision-makers, whatever their current circumstances may be. That said, it would be foolish to depend entirely on a single source for guidance, albeit one as insightful and practical as this one is. Rigorous, sometimes painful soul-searching must first be completed. In a perfect world, everyone in a given organization cooperates, collaborates, and communicates effectively. In reality, that is true of very few organizations. For all others, a team can be created and then generously supported whose mission is to solve a given problem or exploit an opportunity but one which, in process, also demonstrates HOW to complete any other mission with effective cooperation, collaboration, and communication.
Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out all other volumes in Harvard Business Essentials Series as well as O’Toole’s Leading Change, Evan I. Schwartz’s Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith’s The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman’s Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, Dorothy A. Leonard, Walter C. Swap’s When Sparks Fly: Harnessing the Power of Group Creativity, Gary Harpst’s Six Disciplines for Excellence, Carla O’Dell’s If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice, and Jason Jennings’ Think Big, Act Small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive.A solid book about Teams (2004-12-14)
I enjoyed this book about teams, it provided very good overal information on all of the different stages teams go through from start to finish. The book also included things that must be done, and things to avoid.
This book will prepare the reader well to tackle challenging tasks with their teams. It will help determine what should be done individually, as a work group or as a team. Something I have personally experienced myself that they covered really well is the need to define the projet well as you assemble your teams, and also to define measures of success, roles, communcations methods and decision rules to be used by the team leader - Team leaders will find it very useful.
Also a small section on vitual teams working together remotely which I think could have been more extensive, but still covered all of the needs of a virtual team, including the need to meet face to face at the start of the project to build the teamwork and cooperation spirit of the team.
What I did not like? The main thing is that the book looked at teams mostly from the point of view of a large organization. Not much talk about small teams operating from small to medium enterprises, and how smaller and more flexible teams can also bring great benefits.
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A very good book on teams overall.
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