Creating Teams with an Edge

Harvard Business Essentials

by Harvard Business Publishing

Creating Teams with an The Complete Skill Set to Build Powerful and Influential TeamsTeams can be a driving force for organizational performance-and managers can play a key role in teams' ultimate success or failure. Highlighting the latest research on team development and dynamics-and including hands-on tools for improving communication, resolving conflicts, promoting interdependence, and more-this guide will help managers at all levels to motivate teams to achieve higher performance.The Harvard Business Essentials series is for managers at all levels but is especially relevant for new managers. It offers on-the-spot guidance, coaching, and tools on the most relevant topics in business. Each book includes the critical information that managers need on a given topic-from budgeting to hiring to communication to strategy-and offers interactive tools and worksheets that translate advice into action. Providing ready answers to day-to-day issues, these guides make sound, trusted mentoring advice available whenever managers need it.Other Books in the HBE Managing Change and TransitionHiring and Keeping the Best PeopleFinance for ManagersBusiness CommunicationsInnovationNegotiation

Genres: Business

Paperback

First published January 31, 2004

About the author

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a publisher founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, independent corporation and an affiliate of Harvard Business School (distinct from Harvard University Press), with a focus on improving business management practices. The company offers articles, books, case studies, simulations, videos, learning programs, and digital tools to organizations and subscribers.
HBP consists of three market units: Education, Corporate Learning, and Harvard Business Review Group. Their offering consists of print and digital media (Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Review Press books, Harvard Business School cases), events, digital learning (Harvard ManageMentor, HMM Spark), blended learning, and campus experiences.

Reviews

[Baigali.Bjw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have preferred a good article over this book.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creating Teams with an Edge (Harvard Businbess Essentials)
Richard Luecke with Jeff Polzer
Harvard Business School Press

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

Note the sequence of subjects addressed. Luecke and Polzer offer a step-by-step process that is cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective. Throughout their narrative, they provide an abundance of observations, suggestions, caveats, strategies, tactics, and checklists that 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) that 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 that 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 that, in process, also demonstrates HOW to complete any other mission with effective cooperation, collaboration, and communication.