What do you think?
Rate this book
Team Up!!: Applying Lessons from Neuroscience to Improve Collaboration, Innovation and Results
This book is about how to create more collaborative teams.
The authors have applied lessons from neuroscience to typical leadership and team challenges. These lessons show us that our natural drive for survival is part of the problem.
We follow a fictitious – yet very real - management team as they learn and grow through a culture change programme. A leadership training programme provides the team with brain-based self-awareness and self-management skills. Team members are then supported as they implement new skills and behaviours together. They learn how to manage their emotional reactions, they begin to view themselves as a collective and consciously create a more collaborative team culture.
The authors give us just enough theory to understand what is going on in the team and their individual brains without creating a neuroscience textbook. We get to know the team and some very common challenges. The presented solution is no quick fix. Instead, we get an integrated approach to change that we can apply in any organisation.
The messages from the authors are clear: train leaders in their teams and support them as they implement their new skills together. Base your programmes on available science.
The authors have applied lessons from neuroscience to typical leadership and team challenges. These lessons show us that our natural drive for survival is part of the problem.
We follow a fictitious – yet very real - management team as they learn and grow through a culture change programme. A leadership training programme provides the team with brain-based self-awareness and self-management skills. Team members are then supported as they implement new skills and behaviours together. They learn how to manage their emotional reactions, they begin to view themselves as a collective and consciously create a more collaborative team culture.
The authors give us just enough theory to understand what is going on in the team and their individual brains without creating a neuroscience textbook. We get to know the team and some very common challenges. The presented solution is no quick fix. Instead, we get an integrated approach to change that we can apply in any organisation.
The messages from the authors are clear: train leaders in their teams and support them as they implement their new skills together. Base your programmes on available science.
194 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 24, 2014
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 7, 2014
Through a combination of illustration and explaining, Lori and Frode take us through the fundamentals of their cutting edge approach to leadership and organisation development. They make it easy to read and relate to, by building each point into a case study - the story of a typical company struggling with growth and change along with the passionate energy of its key leaders.
Although the company is fictitious, I recognised it as if it was my own! They were good, so they grew. The founder stepped back to make space for the next leaders - but had trouble letting go effectively. The new change agents felt stifled. Characters clashed. How familiar it all is to me.
Some core points from the story:
* While it feels as if building a business is all about getting the job done, in practice it becomes more and more about relationship as the business grows.
* Leadership skills can be learned - but it doesn't work if the learning is done in isolation from the organisation and team you are leading. Leadership development works best if it is done in an experiential way, in-house with the intact team learning together and backed by team coaching.
* To work in teams and/or lead them, we need to find a way to cope with our hard-wired reactivity. Neuroscience helps us understand that being reactive, defensive etc is just part of our heritage as humans - and we can learn to cope with these reactions with a lot more skill and finesse than our primal limbic system does on its own.
* Organisations and teams are relationship systems, and to work effectively in such circumstances takes a systemic approach. There are useful tools to learn relationship systems skills and people like the authors can teach them.
The authors are deeply experienced in working with leaders and teams in organisations. I have a personal connection with them - Lori was one of my much-admired coach trainers way back in 2007, and again when I started in earnest with Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) in 2012.
Clearly there is a huge amount of research and experience behind what they share in this book. I wish there was a reference or reading list included.
Although the company is fictitious, I recognised it as if it was my own! They were good, so they grew. The founder stepped back to make space for the next leaders - but had trouble letting go effectively. The new change agents felt stifled. Characters clashed. How familiar it all is to me.
Some core points from the story:
* While it feels as if building a business is all about getting the job done, in practice it becomes more and more about relationship as the business grows.
* Leadership skills can be learned - but it doesn't work if the learning is done in isolation from the organisation and team you are leading. Leadership development works best if it is done in an experiential way, in-house with the intact team learning together and backed by team coaching.
* To work in teams and/or lead them, we need to find a way to cope with our hard-wired reactivity. Neuroscience helps us understand that being reactive, defensive etc is just part of our heritage as humans - and we can learn to cope with these reactions with a lot more skill and finesse than our primal limbic system does on its own.
* Organisations and teams are relationship systems, and to work effectively in such circumstances takes a systemic approach. There are useful tools to learn relationship systems skills and people like the authors can teach them.
The authors are deeply experienced in working with leaders and teams in organisations. I have a personal connection with them - Lori was one of my much-admired coach trainers way back in 2007, and again when I started in earnest with Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC) in 2012.
Clearly there is a huge amount of research and experience behind what they share in this book. I wish there was a reference or reading list included.
February 14, 2015
examples and theory makes this an actionable business book
I usually put down a business book after the third chapter. Everything else is just repetition. Not Team Up! This book provided useful tools and strategies to developing teams and resolving conflict by teaching concepts based in neuroscience and systems theories. Sounds boring, but the authors weaved in a realistic story that showed how these concepts can play out in the executive suite and beyond. I suppose the real test of usefulness of any book is whether the lessons are internalized and used long after the book is put down, but I suspect that I'll be coming back to this one often.
I usually put down a business book after the third chapter. Everything else is just repetition. Not Team Up! This book provided useful tools and strategies to developing teams and resolving conflict by teaching concepts based in neuroscience and systems theories. Sounds boring, but the authors weaved in a realistic story that showed how these concepts can play out in the executive suite and beyond. I suppose the real test of usefulness of any book is whether the lessons are internalized and used long after the book is put down, but I suspect that I'll be coming back to this one often.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews