In The Discipline of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore the often counter-intuitive features that make up high-performing teams-such as selecting team members for skill, not compatibility-and explain how managers can set specific goals to foster team development. The result is improved productivity and teams that can be counted on to deliver more than just the sum of their parts. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.
Concepts, Principles, and Practical Techniques for Improving Small-Group Performance
The authors of the phenomenal bestseller, The Wisdom of Teams, are back. This time Jon Katzenbach and Doug Smith focus on the issues of small group discipline and performance and the challenges presented by revolutionary technologies that enable the creation of virtual teams and global teams.
The Discipline of Teams helps small groups implement the disciplines, frameworks, tools, and techniques that enable performance. With detailed guidance and dozens of indispensable exercises, they present a regimen proven to improve performance and help groups adhere to the Six Basic Principles of Team Discipline:
? Keep team membership small
? Ensure that members have complementary skills
? Develop a common purpose
? Set common goals
? Establish a commonly agreed upon working approach
? Integrate mutual and individual accountability
The Discipline of Teams is an indispensable resource for any small group in any organization that wants to raise the bar by setting and achieving more ambitious performance goals again and again.
Katzenbach and Smith's work on teams over the past decade has been called "essential," "path breaking," and "the best ever" by Business Week, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Leader to Leader, Fast Company, the Financial Times, and other publications around the world. Tens of thousands of teams, from the executive suite to the front lines, have applied the Katzenbach and Smith disciplines to increase the performance of their organizations and themselves.
