The New Why Teams Don't Work

The New Why Teams Don't Work

by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
Released January 2000
Publisher(s): Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 9781605093857

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Book description

The move to teams has largely failed, say Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, mainly because teams themselves are failing to think through the human implications of teaming. The New Why Teams Don't Work is a handbook for team members and team leaders to maintain the highest possible level of team intelligence-the skills, attitudes, and emotional flexibility to get the most out of a team's inherent differences.
Describing what teams are really like, not how they ought to be, the book teaches people how to work together to make decisions, stay in budget, and achieve team goals. Robbins and Finley show, for instance, how to get hidden agendas on the table, clarify individual roles, learn what team members expect and want from each other, choose the right decision-making process, and much more.
Updated throughout, the book includes completely new material on team intelligence, team technology, collaboration vs. teamwork, team balance, teams at the top, the team of one, plus all new and updated examples.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Preface
  5. What’s New
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. part one The Dream of Teams
    1. chapter one The Team Ideal
      1. A Short History of Teams
      2. Why Teams?
      3. The Fork in the Road
      4. A Rosetta Stone
    2. chapter 2 Team Instinct
      1. The Need for Interaction
      2. Types of Interaction
    3. chapter 3 Individual Needs vs. Team Needs
      1. Rebalancing the Load
      2. Find the Agenda
    4. chapter 4 Teamwork vs. Socialwork
  8. part two Where Teams Go Wrong
    1. chapter 5 Misplaced Goals, Confused Objectives
      1. Leaders, Visions, Goals
      2. Goal Wars
      3. Goal Sadism
      4. The Road to Nowhere
      5. Goal-setting by the Spoonful
      6. Goal Sludge
      7. The Final Element
    2. chapter 6 Bad Decision Making
    3. chapter 7 Empowerment Uncertainties
    4. chapter 8 Unresolved Roles
      1. Hot Potatoes
      2. Good Old Grace
      3. Turf Wars
    5. chapter 9 The Wrong Policies and Procedures
      1. What We Have Learned
    6. chapter 10 The People Problem
      1. The Logic of Misunderstanding
      2. Happy Talk and Human Variation
      3. Let’s Think
      4. Let’s Play
      5. Let’s Work
      6. The Will to Team
    7. chapter 11 Dealing with Difficult People
      1. Team Jerks
      2. Team Blowhards
      3. Team Brats
      4. Dark Angels
    8. chapter 12 Leadership Failure
      1. A Taxonomy of Lousy Leaders…
      2. What Effective Team Leaders Look Like
      3. What Team Leaders Do to Get People to Follow
      4. Leadership Skill Sets
      5. The Wrong Leadership
      6. Can You “Fix” Poor Leadership?
    9. chapter 13 Faulty Vision
      1. Getting the Picture
      2. Pitfalls of Communicating the Vision
    10. chapter 14 Toxic Teaming Atmosphere
      1. Team Tyranny
      2. Creating a Teaming Environment
      3. Teams vs. Mobs
      4. When to Team
      5. The Team Biosphere
      6. A Nod to the Predatory Organization
    11. chapter 15 Competitive Hazards
      1. The Hazards of Collaboration
      2. Grafting Competition with Collaboration
    12. chapter 16 Communication Shortfalls
      1. Teaching, Learning, and Communication
      2. Communication Horror Stories
      3. Learning to Listen
      4. Feedback
    13. chapter 17 Rewards and Recognition
      1. This Book’s Sole Sports Analogy
      2. Something Rotten in the State of Rewards
      3. The Importance of Security
      4. The Real Culture
      5. Reengineered Rewards
      6. Team-Defined Rewards
      7. Who Decides Who Is Rewarded?
      8. What Behaviors Are Rewarded?
    14. chapter 18 Trust Hell
      1. The Stinking Corpse
      2. Nine Strategies for Creating Trust
      3. Perceptions and Trust
    15. chapter 19 Change Issues
      1. Understanding Change
      2. Seven Hard Truths
      3. Change and Personality
      4. Human Speedbumps
      5. Process Speedbumps
      6. Structure Speedbumps
      7. Rules for Team Change
      8. Leveraging Your Change
      9. Dodge the Potholes
  9. part three Team Myths
    1. chapter 20 The Myth of Adventure Learning
    2. chapter 21 The Myth that Sports Teams and Work Teams Are Similar
    3. chapter 22 The Myth of Personality Type
    4. chapter 23 Myths of Team Leadership
      1. The Myth of Senior Teams
    5. chapter 24 The Myth that People Like Working Together
    6. chapter 25 The Myth that Teamwork Is More Productive than Individual Work
    7. chapter 26 The Myth of “The More, the Merrier” on Teams
    8. chapter 27 The Myth that a Team Must Somehow Have More than One Team Member to Be a Team
    9. chapter 28 The Myth that Teams Work Everywhere
  10. part four Turning Teams Around
    1. chapter 29 Moving Teams through Stages toward Success
      1. The Forming Stage
      2. The Storming Stage
      3. The Norming Stage
      4. The Performing Stage
    2. chapter 30 Teams and Technology
      1. Grappling with Groupware
      2. Does Technology Work?
      3. Technology and Personality
      4. Laurel and Hardy Technologies
    3. chapter 31 Long-Term Team Health
      1. Continuous Clarity
      2. Diagnostic Dangers
  11. Epilogue: Toward Team Intelligence
  12. Index
  13. About the Authors

Product information

  • Title: The New Why Teams Don't Work
  • Author(s): Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
  • Release date: January 2000
  • Publisher(s): Berrett-Koehler Publishers
  • ISBN: 9781605093857