Aligned and Engaged: Hidden Keys for Turning Teamwork into Profit

by Kevin Fox

Business has always recognized the importance of teamwork, and never has it been more critical to success than today. The demands of customers and investors who truly have choice on a global scale, are forcing new levels of velocity, efficiency, and reliability on companies in almost every industry. Meeting this new standard of performance is driving companies to improve the coordination, alignment, and engagement of their people—their teamwork—to unprecedented levels. And this calls for a new understanding of the underlying elements of teamwork and for better tools to help leaders systematically improve performance through teamwork. Aligned and Engaged is about giving leaders a new understanding of teamwork and better tools to succeed. Teamwork isn’t something “apart” from the business, it’s HOW everything in the business gets done. The old approach to Teambuilding through exercises, workshops or retreats often conducted outside of the work environment assumed the problem was in the skills or knowledge of the people. By giving employees a better understanding of their co-workers, or enhancing listening or communication skills, teamwork would naturally get better....... And it usually did, for a little while—but then conflict would arise again, collaboration would suffer, and performance would slip back to where it was. The reason for this is simple, but not obvious. Teamwork only matters in the context of the company—that is what the team is about, helping the company to win. Teamwork is not about communication, it’s about how effectively we work together to achieve the goal. The way people work in any company comes from a variety of factors, including how they are measured, their training, their job description, what their manager cares about, where they are in the process related to the customer, etc. These factors, and others, produce the teamwork, good and bad, that happens in every company. Misaligned measures that put departments at odds with each other will produce poor teamwork, no matter how much communication or goodwill there may be. Aligned and Engaged is about those two elements which are the two essential components needed to make teamwork really pay off for your company. Your people need to be aligned toward the company’s goals and with each other in order to work effectively together. This is far easier said than done because balancing the individual responsibilities of each department and team member to create accountability, with how every individual’s work contributes to the bottom line in a measurable way is darn tough to do. The other half of the team equation is engagement—the process of getting the very best out of your people. When a team is aligned and engaged, there’s not much more that matters. Inside you will discover 29 practical tools, processes and techniques for increasing the alignment and engagement that leads to higher profits. You will also learn the indicators of alignment and engagement issues so you can better diagnose the needs of your company and maximize the gains of your efforts. As the level of competition continues to rise, the efficiency and effectiveness of your teamwork is becoming more and more critical to performance. Having a working understanding of how teamwork is created and the tools to build it in your company is essential to today’s leaders.

149 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

See also: Kevin Fox for books on ceramics and materials science.

Kevin Fox is a dual citizen of the United States and the Republic of Ireland. He has been a professional Screenwriter (The Negotiator) and Television Writer and Producer since 1995. Until the Next Time is his first novel, inspired by his maternal grandfather and the stories of his family, including those from his father and uncles who were New York City police officers.

Reviews

[Jack Vinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Nice read. Lots of familiar ideas, and since I've known Kevin for a while, I could even hear him speaking some of the topics.

https://www.jackvinson.com/blog/2016/...