Smart Teams: How to Move from Friction to Flow and Work Better Together

by Dermot Crowley

Learn how your team can communicate, congregate and collaborate more effectively than ever

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to build a culture where productivity thrives. This book shows you how to turn around the unproductive team behaviours that create friction. You'll learn the 'superproductive' behaviours that promote flow and the most impactful productivity principles for working better together. Smart Teams shares the practical guidelines and key skills you need to lead a productive, cooperative team.

Email noise, unproductive meetings and poorly organised projects can stifle creativity and disrupt everyone's workflow. A culture that isn't productive results in long hours, more stress, and a lack of balance. But by raising awareness of how our behaviours impact our work and our colleagues, you build the desire and capability to change within your team. This book is packed with tips, guidelines and expert insights for leaders and managers at any level.

Foster a culture of 'superproductivity' Create a set of Smart Team principles to guide cooperation Run fewer, shorter and more effective meetings Collaborate more productively on projects Reduce urgency, interruptions and email noise People want their work to matter, they want to make an impact and they want to do it all with a healthy work-life balance. Productivity is the key to making it all happen! Smart Teams shows you how to implement the culture shift that will allow your team to flourish.

This book is part of the Smart Productivity series, helping readers find practical solutions for better managing their time, energy and focus.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Management, Professional Development, Productivity

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 26, 2023

Reviews

[Elena Granger · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was an extremely boring explanation of the obvious things. I don't mind when people write books about obvious things and explain them in a fun and entertaining way.
The daily tasks like emails, calls etc are noise affecting our productivity. Ok, known fact, almost every book on productivity has it. And it's not even related to teams specifically, it's true for individuals also. So why include this point into a book about teams?
I anticipated more about team related productivity and less general productivity tips and this book is full of those general tips and lacks the team specific.
Too much water.

[Tinatin Osmonova · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explains how to structure emails and meetings effectively to ensure there’s enough time left for actual work.

[Chad Rexin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good tips in this book. It's probably one to refer back to from time to time. Key points are to show up on time, note the things you as an individual have control over like meetings and emails. Think twice before sending emails, especially on a reply all or adding people to cc lines who may not need to be on the email. Also make use of other communication as appropriate like Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc. for communication that doesn't require an email, but also noting that there is some cost of productivity for this as well. Meetings should have agendas and if someone isn't needed in a meeting, they shouldn't have to join just to be in the meeting. Overall I'd recommend this book for anyone working in an organization where you need to work with others in the organization or even with external teams.

[Rhonda · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no doubt that emails and meetings can kill actual work, and this is a pretty standard, easy to read book with standard tips on how to deal with both. While it advises picking one problem then dealing with that, it doesn't recognise the inter-relationships between problems. For instance, if you send email instead of having a meeting, there are more emails. Most meetings generate follow-up emails. If you phone a co-worker instead of emailing or meeting, you interrupt their workflow. The insights into the author's experience working with companies on productivity was fascinating - and highlighted how hard it can be. Meeting and email etiquette has to be led from the top.

I do think email is very useful, but we need to lose the urge to reply instantly, or even at all.

[Melissa Bush · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book in this series, Smart Work, was an absolute game changer for the way I run my business. Perhaps because I’m older and wiser now, I didn’t find as many gold nuggets in this book. But nevertheless I like Dermot’s writing style - even if you already know the theory it always helps to revisit it in a book like this, and check in with yourself as to whether you’re actually implementing the practices.

[Corrinne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dermot Crowley’s "Smart Teams: Communicate, Congregate, Collaborate. How to work better together" is a must read. Full of practical strategies that will ensure your team culture enables the realisation of your team vision by removing the time and energy sappers, reading this book is an investment that will pay immediate dividends.

[Quinns Pheh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Productivity has a lot to do with how much task one could do and the culture in which you work and also how one interact with others. Whoever one might be, concrete steps could be taken to improve the productivity of the team and company. Improving communication could curb turbulent behaviour and also acquire a better approach to catastrophe and emergencies.

[Nehmat Jbeili · Rating 4 out of 5]

We read this for work. It's practical advice that you can tailor to your team and workspace. Might not work for every team.
It's got ways to deal with productivity and tips on how to deal with punctuality and purpose.
The less meetings guide was my fave.

[Shane Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great read full of not ground-breaking info but logical direction that when followed should yield very positive outcomes for project leaders. Keen to implement a few of the strategies and see if we can become more productive and proactive in our work methods!

[Felipe CZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Productivity has a lot to do with culture, so you can improve it by making better ways of communication, and developing a more active approach to emergencies, getting clear the why, what, and who behind messages you send.

[Zongkai · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a book I read for a Team Day activity, which aims to elevate the team's engagement level.
Purposeful, mindful, punctual, and reliable are good structure to organise thoughts around collaboration.

[Ryan Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was okay. Some good pieces of information but pretty repetitive at points.

[Dr. Tobias Christian Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the idea of the book. But everything depends on the managers mind and thinking ahead

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of good small tips to improve collaboration, emails, meeting agendas, etc, and some principles tying the ideas together.

[Dave Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some helpful tips for worker smarter not harder, particularly for teams of 10+ with multiple departments.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Theme Song: Whole Team Winning by S.O.