How This Book Will Help You Help Teams Help Themselves

This book gives you the tools to analyze a team with confidence and to provide constructive feedback. It provides you with the tools to creatively generate options among team members and then gain a consensus of what to try. It gives you tools to help the team plan the actions it needs to help itself.

Covered are ways to help the team with its task and relationship difficulties while adding more tools to your toolbox beyond those offered in Tools for Team Excellence. It furthers efforts to address the seven key components that separate the excellent organizational teams from the mediocre ones. You will learn how to help a team diagnose its strengths and weaknesses, help establish a clear sense of direction, improve communications, ensure systematic problem solving and decision making, resolve dysfunctional conflicts, motivate and coach team players, build diplomatic ties in the organization, and help teams get unstuck.

In reading this book you will have the opportunity to learn a lot about yourself as well as others. There is a natural leader within you, and this book will help you find it. If you are willing to give up your desire for perfectionism and control while steadfastly adhering to a desire to make a difference, you will benefit from this book. I want you to take teams seriously and yourself lightly. Helping a team by being a leader does not mean putting all the responsibility on your shoulders. You are to work with the team, not take it over. You are not being asked to be a saint or a martyr. You are being asked to serve and to lead. You are being asked to identify the leadership talent within the team even if you are the assigned leader of that team.

The main theme of chapter 1 ”that team leaders must help others help themselves ”is carried throughout all subsequent chapters. At the end of each chapter you will be asked to complete a review to identify what you have learned and how you will attempt to use what you learned. Leadership development requires active learning. Merely gaining insights by reading will not be enough. You will need to practice the skills required of you as team leader: teambuilding , goal setting, communicating, problem solving, decision making, motivating, coaching, practicing diplomacy , monitoring, reviving stuck teams, leading executive leadership teams, and so on.

Be the X-factor in your organization's effort to build excellent teams.

Note

This book was written for both the person attempting to provide leadership to a single team within an organization and the leader overseeing the development of multiple teams within a larger organization. While the text is generally addressed to the former, the lessons contained herein are equally applicable to the latter.

Gregory E. Huszczo, Ph.D., is an award-winning teacher and researcher, an industrial/organizational psychologist , a consultant and trainer, and author of the classic work in the field of team development, Tools for Team Excellence. With more than thirty years of experience researching , consulting, and teaching in the area of teams, personalities, and leadership, he has worked with more than 100 organizations including Ford Motor Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, La-Z-Boy, Unisys, UAW, Navistar, and the Red Cross, as well as several public sector agencies, school systems, and hospitals . Currently professor of organizational behavior and development at Eastern Michigan University, he also has taught at several other universities and institutes including Michigan State University and The University of Southwestern Louisiana.

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