Customer Reviews

The Discipline of Teams: A Mindbook-Workbook for Delivering Small Group Performance

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Discipline of Teams updates and extends the best-seller, The Wisdom of Teams. "The most important characteristic of teams is discipline; not bonding, togetherness, or empowerment." You are encouraged to be sure that you use teams only when they make sense as a performance unit, rather than having a single-leader approach. Using sophisticated Marine units as models, you begin to appreciate that some tasks are better suited to individuals and some tasks need to combine team and individual elements. In fact, complex tasks may require many teams focusing on subtasks. The book also looks at virtual teams and the impact of electronic communications on teams (concluding that nothing really changes -- you just have more ways to communicate and face-to-face is still important).

A team makes sense when you need to accomplish something more than what individual performances will give you. A good example comes in new product development. Each specialist can do a good job, and the project can easily be a bust. By thinking together, potential failure can become success by tweaking each perspective in new ways. The authors also point out that many times goals are set that sound like individual performance, but better goals would set directions requiring a team.

An effective team needs to have:

(1) an understandable charter

(2) communicate and coordinate effectively

(3) have clear roles and responsibilities for individuals

(4) use time-efficient processes and

(5) have a sense of accountability.

"Whenever a small group can deliver performance through the combined sum of individual contributions, then the single-leader discipline is the most effective choice."

The book provides many ways to make both teams and single-leader groups work better. In fact, it focuses on those areas that are most likely to cause problems, like poorly defined goals, keeping the size of the group as small as possible, not having the skills needed, time pressures, and using the wrong leadership discipline). I also liked the fact that the book looked at the question of when you should fold a team.

The authors clearly understand a great deal about making teams more effective, and anyone can learn from this book. I think those who liked The Wisdom of Teams will find it to be a useful refresher with some valuable new material.

The book contains many exercises and workbook questions that I happily endorse. They make the book much more practical and useful. If you just did the exercises and the workbook questions, this would be a five star book. The explanations are just icing on the cake.

After you have finished this book, I also suggest you think about whether you have set the right priorities in your organization. Realizing that you can only do a few things at once, what should they be? Be sure to give yourself a chance to pick tasks that will benefit from teams.

Find ways to make human cooperation more beneficial . . . for that's our strength!

As the sequel to The Wisdom of Teams, John Katzenbach and Douglas Smith return to uncover the tools, techniques, frameworks and disciplines required to unlock the performance potential that lie within today's teams and virtual teams.

Performance potential is not guaranteed, and you need to become an expert at the two disciplines - team and single leader and, you must be able to implement the right discipline to suit the performance need of your team.

Katzenbach & Smith identify and discuss the Six Basic Principles of Team Discipline: 1) keep team numbers to a minimum, 2) ensure that team members possess skills that compliment one another, 3) identify a clear performance purpose, 4) agree on outcome based goals, 5) provide clear roles and responsibilities and, 6) ensure mutual and individual accountability.

As a follow-up to their insights and strategies, Katzenbach and Smith provide practical exercises at the conclusion of each chapter for both team members and leaders to get them on the road to optimal performance.

The Discipline of Teams is easy to read and will provide the reader with tools, techniques and strategies to assist in becoming top performers within today's organizations. On a personal note, The Discipline of Teams provided me with some new techniques to help develop and maintain effective teams for today and in the future.

This book excels at drawing the line between leader-driven and team-driven groups of individuals. It also characterizes some of the failure cases very well -- teams that are too large, teams that don't have a clear vision and purpose, teams that are disconnected from the rest of the organization, etc.

However, I struggled to see how to clearly draw the line between which style to guide your team into. The rough guidance seemed a bit self-referential: "when the task can best be done with a single leader, do it with a single leader." What about if you're not sure? Try both and take it as a lesson learned? Maybe I just missed it, but the book lacked the critial information I needed to be able to fully apply it in my situation.

This so-called sequel to The Wisdom of Teams is a "workbook" with exercises. It offers no new insights/guidance for readers of the 2002 paperback update of The Wisdom of Teams.

I am a fan of Katzenbach and Smith. As a business consultant, I have introduced clients to their work and worked to adapt and apply their insights. Wisdom of Teams is a great foundation. Their other books--Peak Performance and Why Pride Matters More than Money--offer useful new insights even though they are better understood if readers are familiar with The Widdom of Teams.

"The discipline of teams" is the sequel of "Wisdom of teams" by the same author. Wisdom of teams is considered to probably be the standard on teams, so making a sequel that's as good as wisdom, is pretty hard.

One of the key messages in the book is that a group of people will need to chose between either the team disciple or the single-leader discipline. It's not just a matter of which one is better since that depends on the type of work. Some work is better done using team disciple and some work is better done using single-leader disciple.

The first four chapters were a disappointment for me. The first chapter was talking a lot about the choice between team discipline and single-leader discipline. The second chapter was an introduction to virtual teams. The third and the fourth talked about setting goals and performance of teams and groups. I felt the book didn't really add anything to wisdom or other team literature.

Luckily things changed in the 5th chapter when the focus switched from the choice between the two disciplines to how to get the team discipline to work. Chapter 5 talked about the cross-learning that will need to happen within a team to make it work well. The sixth chapter about agreeing on a common purpose and on shared working agreements and chapter 7 talked about the hard topic of shared responsibility and individual responsibility. For me, these three chapters made the book worthwhile and a worthy sequel to Wisdom. Chapter 8 then talked again about virtual teams, chapter 9 about helping teams to get unstuck and the last chapter is about the change (as always...)

In the end, I felt the book was worth reading and a worthy sequel to Wisdom of teams. It taught me some more about teams and also gave me some tools and exercises. Worth reading.

This book left me wanting more...more of the "Wisdom of Teams" the predecessor of this book. It was bland. They touched on some real world examples but not enough in my opinion. It was a quick read and felt that it could have been deeper. This book could have developed more specifics into developing single-leader or team disciplines.

This was a great read! 15 pages into the book I came up with a great idea for my restaurant. I continued to the read the book and within 2 days, I completed it and had written an Executive Summary for my business. Very motivational and provides tons of information. I'm glad I purchased the book.

I won't write a detailed review, here's what I found helpful:
- the distinction between performance and activity goals.

A re-cap of their original research into the five basic elements fo effective group work.
1. Have or develop an understandable charter.
2. Communicate and co-ordinate effectively.
3. Establish clear roles and responsibilities.
4. Create time-efficient processes.
5. Develop a sense of accountability.

Clear distinction between when a single leader 'discipline' is warranted or when a real team discipline is warranted.

Great re-cap about establishing clear outcomes.

Once the background is set-up, it becomes an issue of delving deeper into the application of their recommendations. It is great stuff! But you'll have to buy the book to 'get it'!

They do a good job in dissecting how virtual teams are different and similar to teams with co-located members.

Finally, I really like their road to getting a team 'unstuck'. Their observation that teams that become stuck revert to single-leader leadership is absolutely true. They posit that it's necessary for a good team to become stuck. As pain as it might be, you have a great opportunity to:
- clarify goals
- identify missing skills
- address attitude issues
- grapple with changing members
- address time pressures
- work on lack of discipline

The chapter on change is pretty decent, the rest of the content is golden.

I've rated this five stars as it's a must for anyone who works with teams.

Damien Faughnan