Customer Reviews

Team Building: How to Motivate and Manage People (2 Cassettes)

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As a teacher in a middle school, teamwork is very important to me. I picked up this workshop on cassette because I felt there were some aspects of our team that were dysfunctional. Sanborne presents some very specific opinions about teams and the role of individuals in any work group. His theories aren't just concepts out of context though. He presents some very solid habits, practices and useful advice for making a team more effective.
He begins by outlining some very basic principles of what teamwork is, and breaks down misconceptions of team work. Then he moves to specific strategies offered to make team playing more effective. He has advice for administrators, managers, middlemen and even the "lowly" intern that make effective teamwork.
His tape also addresses Risk Taking, Effective Communication, Team Recruiting, Job Trading, Management Training, Empathy at work, Goal Setting, and the effectiveness of increased responsibility. Practitioners of his benchmarks that provide good examples of his concepts include business giants such as Wal-Mart, and McDonalds as well as others.
Though the trends talked about in his tape are reflective of yesterday's corporate trends, he has very good ideas that are still practical and useful today. I am eager to pick up the tape and listen to it again in August, just before school starts this fall because it will reinforce the practical strategies I have developed from his advice. I strongly suggest implementing Mark's ideas because they are sound and practical. Putting them into practice will make any team more efficient, successful and dynamic.

This is an excellent seminar. It covers the subject of team building extremely well and it's a pleasure to listen to the virtuoso technique of the presenter. The tape medium has some advantages over books or live attendance, because you can listen to it on the way to work, thereby making good use of time that might not otherwise be productive. And you can stop, rewind and reflect on the relevance of the presenter's ideas. Arguably, it's better than being a part of the live audience.

Mark Sanborn is an expert speaker with years of experience in giving seminars and motivational speeches. In one of his stories he gives a clue as to his own motivation for developing this expertise. He relates that early in his career he was promoted to be a manager and that, having had no preparation or training for this job, he tore his hair out for 8 months before his supervisor sent him to a training seminar to learn how to do it. He also points out that if you can develop 10 people to be 10% more effective, then you've created a whole unit of productivity. Since he's personally felt the benefit of this kind of training and has since trained thousands of people, he must feel good about his contribution.

Sanborn breaks the team building exercise into six steps: 1) Locate, 2) Educate, 3) Cooperate, 4) Communicate, 5) Motivate, and 6) Celebrate. In each of these steps he provides additional sub-steps, illustrated by entertaining stories and anecdotes.

The advice is practical and would surely help anyone building a team from scratch. It could also be used by anyone wanting to build either large organizations or small teams, whether the team is new or has been in place for some time. For example, a couple of pieces of advice I found useful for my team were:

1. Break team meetings into six components: 1) Accomplishments and Blunders -- review successes and failures, 2) Accountability -- check that what was supposed to get done got done, 3) Action Plan -- plan what needs to be done by the next meeting, 4) R&R -- single out team members for rewards and recognition (and not just the superstars), 5) Professional Development -- provide growth and enrichment using audio, video, or guest speakers, 6) Announcements -- pre-print and distribute and point to the highlights

2. Eliminate the term "constructive criticism." Instead, use the following three steps of "effective feedback:" 1) Criticize behavior not the person -- describe what was done and what happened as a result of what was done, 2) involve them in discussion -- ask "What they would do differently?" and "Have you considered...?" 3) Wait for the teachable moment -- provide instruction feedback just before the new behavior is needed.

These are just a couple of examples, but there are many other practical lists and tips for hiring, creating a leadership team, providing non-monetary rewards and other major aspects of team building. Sanborn has an excellent grasp of the subject. He follows the general thinking and enlightened management approaches of Maslow, Drucker and others, providing memorable descriptions of his main points with well-chosen anecdotes and stories to back them up.

Tapes are very effective, but there's a downside. The music and talk introductions that CareerTrack supplies are irritating. Also the need to package the material into neat lists and present them in a slick way to an audience makes one question whether the material is solid and actionable, and I, personally, would have liked to have had a companion book that covers the same material, but in more depth. In fact, I'd recommend using the tape in conjunction with some books like Drucker's "The Effective Executive," and Hiam's "Motivating and Rewarding Employees."

However, Sanborn is a great presenter who knows and cares about his subject and I found the content well chosen. The tapes are worth their price just for using as the professional development component of team meetings. I'll be introducing an audio segment into my team meetings, and this will be the first tape that I'll use.

Graham Lawes