We were honored when Ken, Alan, and Peter asked us to write the foreword to their new book, Go Team! Ken and Alan have been our friends and colleagues for more than thirty years. We are delighted that they are adding this guide to understanding and achieving “Next Level” team status to the Blanchard library on team excellence.
For the past two decades significant changes have been occurring in our workplaces involving how work is structured and how decisions are made. Organizations have had to reinvent themselves to meet the demands of a rapidly changing global environment. Productivity, quality, and human satisfaction have increased in those organizations that have begun to use high involvement management practices. And teams have been the cornerstones of many of these successful change efforts.
Teamwork and collaboration are how work gets done effectively. Team-based practices, when successfully implemented, lead to higher productivity, increased satisfaction, and better employee health, and they promote our democratic values. Most people today participate in at least one and sometimes many different teams. Unfortunately, those teams often do not perform up to their potential. One of the major barriers to effectively implementing teams is that people have not been properly trained to function in teams as contributing team members.
When we wrote, with Ken Blanchard, The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams in 1989, we were interested in providing a basic understanding of
• The characteristics of high performing teams
• The stages of team development
• The leadership behaviors appropriate at each stage
That book, now in its second edition, has become a best-selling standard for understanding the core essentials for building high performing teams, and thousands of people have participated in training programs based on those concepts. The popular sequel, High Five! The Magic of Working Together, written with Sheldon Bowles, builds on those concepts and through an engaging parable shows what individuals and organizations must do to build successful teams.
Go Team! Take Your Team to the Next Level expands on the principles in these two books by building on ideas in the best-selling book by Ken, Alan, and John Carlos: The Three Keys to Empowerment. Now, Ken, Alan, and Peter have created a wonderful field guide that provides practical ideas and activities for moving teams to the Next Level. As you read this book, you will gain both the ability and the confidence to make effective use of information-sharing skills to build trust and responsibility, clear boundary-setting skills to create freedom, and self-managing skills to get great results.
This field guide will serve many teams for many years as an outstanding resource to use to increase team skills, productivity, and morale. It is an ideal follow-up to training in basic team concepts and can help ensure application and sustainability in real-world team settings.
Excellence in leadership, innovation, quality, service, productivity, and human satisfaction in the twenty-first century will best come from people working in teams that can use their potential, knowledge, and motivation. Go Team! is a tool that can help make that happen, and we hope you will use it to Take Your Team to the Next Level.
Don Carew
Eunice Parisi-Carew
Founding Associates of the Ken Blanchard Companies
Coauthors of The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams and High Five! The Magic of Working Together
INTRODUCTION MOVING TEAMWORK TO THE NEXT LEVEL
People in organizations today are increasingly being called upon to work in teams. This is because the work of organizations has become amazingly complex and changes occur constantly. More and more, companies around the world are using teams to deal with this dynamic world of work.
Unfortunately, too few people really understand how to build a team that puts into action the knowledge, experience, and motivation of its people. We do not have to look very far to see numerous examples of failed team efforts – be they in sports, business, or government. Therefore, it is no surprise that people often give up on the idea of teams and try to go it alone. We do not believe that is an effective solution for today’s workplace. Go Team! is our game plan for building better teams – Next Level Teams.
What are Next Level Teams, and what benefits do they bring to the table? First, the benefits: Next Level Teams
• Use all team members’ ideas and motivation
• Make better use of the team members’ and team leader’s time
• Increase productivity and satisfaction for you, your team, and the organization
Second, what are Next Level Teams? They are teams that can
• Use information sharing to build high levels of trust and responsibility
• Use clear boundaries to create the freedom to act responsibly
• Use self-managing skills to make team decisions and get great results
Once the picture of a Next Level Team is clear, you and your team members can assess how you operate now. Then you can begin the process of becoming a Next Level Team that gets great results.
