When Bad Teams Happen to Good People: Your Complete Repair Guide for Successful Teamwork

The teamwork troubleshooter we all need! Turn your team into a cohesive unit.
“This timely book provides readers with a new way of thinking about work and survival strategies for those who find themselves on bad teams. Readers who are looking for a playbook that can help them to understand and develop soft skills needed for teamwork will be eager to have a copy nearby.”—Booklist

Why do some team members not get along? What is the best way to get new teams and ad-hoc teams to maximize their performance in the least amount of time? How can meetings be designed to achieve useful outcomes?

Teams are the source of problem-solving and innovation that today’s organizations need to survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and challenging marketplace.

Teamwork is hard because there is no magic formula or step-by-step procedure to ensure results. Think of a programmer asked to develop new features for a cell phone: they write new code, test the code, troubleshoot problems encountered, revise the code, and repeat the testing process until the new features work without problems. Similarly, a team leader asked to deliver specified outcomes develops a plan, runs team meetings, troubleshoots problems encountered, revises the plan, and repeats until the team outcomes are achieved. The difference is that a programmer has tools to help streamline troubleshooting, while team leaders do not—until now.

Valerie Patrick applies a troubleshooting mindset that includes:

Proven tactics for team members and leaders to address leadership problemsGuidelines for recruiting and changing teams for optimum performanceTechniques to identify and address aspects of team climate that are limiting the productivity of one or more team membersExamples of effective ways to operate teams and of meeting designs that produce transformative outcomes

From the Publisher

There are many examples of how emotions can take control of our thinking and behavior. The brain’s emotion systems are part of our nonconscious brain. A whole host of feelings can result from the brain’s negative emotion systems, including fear, nervousness, hostility, anger, disgust, guilt, shame, self- loathing, sadness, boredom, and loneliness. When our negative feelings run amuck or get ahead of our rational thinking, we can do and say things that we later regret. It can be helpful to learn your body’s early signals that a negative emotion system has been triggered.

The “why” of your life is your sense of purpose. If you can articulate your purpose, then you can craft your participation in teams toward the types of work tasks that bring you a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. A growing body of research shows that a sense of purpose improves mental health, physical health, and quality of life. It stands to reason that knowing your purpose will enhance your team experiences too. Ironically, doing the introspection needed to uncover your purpose helps increase interactions with others relative to self- focus because benefitting others is at the heart of purpose.

Team creativity happens when team embers find new associations that are useful to the team’s work. Our nonconscious brain is wired to find patterns but not the new associations needed for creativity. Creativity does not come naturally from our nonconscious brain because creativity takes engaging the limited capacity of our conscious-thinking brain. Creativity is challenging because we are working against our brain’s natural wiring to find patterns. Creativity is also challenging because it is misunderstood. Widespread creativity myths can be a barrier to creativity. We’ll bust three creativity myths here.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Career Press (July 1, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1632651823
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1632651822
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.9 x 8.9 inches