Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "You are director of in-flight services for a major airline, responsible for some 2,000 flight attendants who look after passenger service and cabin safety..." (more)
Key Phrases: flight attendant teams, competent teamwork, organizational work teams, People Express, New York, David Mathiasen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Winner of the 2004 George R. Terry Book Award!

Teams have more talent and experience, more diverse resources, and greater operating flexibility than individual performers. So why do so many teams either struggle unpleasantly toward an unsatisfactory conclusion-or, worse, crash and burn shortly after launch?

J. Richard Hackman, one of the world's leading experts on group and organizational behavior, argues that the answer to this puzzle is rooted in flawed thinking about team leadership. It is not a leader's management style that determines how well a team performs, but how well a leader designs and supports a team so that members can manage themselves.

According to Hackman, cookie-cutter formulas and prescribed leadership styles often backfire because they place far too much emphasis on the leader as the primary cause of team behavior. In Leading Teams, he identifies the key conditions that any leader can put in place to increase the likelihood of team success-regardless of his or her personality or preferred style of operating.

Through extensive research and compelling examples ranging from orchestras to economic analysts to airline cockpit crews, Hackman identifies five conditions that set the stage for great performances: a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and the availability of competent coaching.

Leading Teams outlines what leaders can do to structure, support, and guide teams in a way that

· enhances the social processes essential to collective work;

· builds shared commitment, skills, and task-appropriate coordination strategies;

· helps members troubleshoot problems and spot emerging opportunities; and

· captures experiences and translates them into shared knowledge.

Out of these conditions, Hackman argues, the very best teams emerge-teams that exceed client expectations, grow in capability over time, and contribute to the learning and personal fulfillment of individual members.

Authoritative, practical, and astutely realistic, Leading Teams offers a new and provocative way of thinking about and leading work teams in any organizational setting.

From the Back Cover

"Written with exceptional clarity and wit, and teeming with original, down-to-earth advice, Leading Teams is indispensable reading for anyone who works in teams, studies them, or wonders what makes them sink or soar."

-Harvey Hornstein, Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

"This is the book I have been waiting for on team effectiveness. Based on findings and containing insights from the leading researcher on teams, Leading Teams has everything. It is engaging, highly readable, and full of practical, useful advice."

-Edward Lawler, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business

"Full of rich stories and organized into compelling cases, Leading Teams clearly communicates an elegant analysis of effective team leadership. A gem for practitioners and researchers alike."

-Chris Argyris, James B. Conant Professor Emeritus, Harvard University and Director, Monitor Group

"In Leading Teams Dr. Hackman takes his extensive knowledge of how to effectively lead teams and mixes it with insightful research and humor, providing the reader with a powerful prescription for improving team performance."

-Dave Bushy, Former Senior Vice President of Flight Operations and 747 Captain, Delta Airlines

"Richard Hackman provides real-world tools that challenge everything you thought you knew about creating high-performing teams. I found myself cheering each time he demolished a popular but wrongheaded conception of how to lead teams and provided a common sense answer in its stead."

-Michael Putz, Senior Manager, Business Development and Strategy, Cisco Systems

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1 edition (July 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578513332
• ISBN-13: 978-1578513338
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #81,831 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book on teams so far, March 8, 2008

By	Bas Vodde (Singapore) - See all my reviews

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Leading teams is the best book on the topic of teams that I've read so far. It's very well structured, well researched, well written and full of useful information that can be used in real life to improve teams.

The book consists of three parts of which part II is the main content of the book. Part I is called "challenge" and starts with an comparison of two different airline companies who have different strategies of improving service quality. One using self-directed team and one using more strict processes and procedures. It explains the advantages and disadvantages of the team approach and puts the challenge to how we can create an environment in which a productive team can work. Hackman then proposes five enabling conditions for getting team to work:

1. A real team
2. Compelling direction
3. Enabling structure
4. Supportive context
5. Expert coaching

Each of these are clarified in the five main chapters.

A real team is defined at having four features: a team task, clear boundaries, defined authority and some stability in members. Each of these is clarified and backed up with very interesting research data.

A compelling direction, a clear goal needs to be set for the team. This energizes the team. The chapter on compelling team has some very interesting material on fixing the process or fixing the goal.

Enabling structure builds also on earlier work done by Richard Hackman and talks about structuring the team and structuring the task that the team needs to do. When both of these are structured then they will enable the team and create a possibility of a really well working, highly productive team.

In supportive context, the rest of the organizational context is discussed. This includes the rewarding system (something I didn't always agreed with the author, though he makes very valid points!), the learning system and the technical supporting system.

In the last of the five points, he more or less focuses on the team leader role. The team leaders role as a coach of the team. He earlier states that the team leader role is certainly overrated, though it still is important. He describes how a team leader can coach the team.

Part III is the closing part of the book. It summarizes some of the earlier conclusions. It consists of one chapter that makes recommendations for moving forward with team in the organization. Then the last chapter the author the author discusses common obstacles and speculates about the future of teams.

Overall, the book was an excellent read. Funny at times, well structured and excellent references. Of all the team-related books, this one stands out. One of the reasons for standing out is that its more based on research than about speculation (like many team books). A must read when you are working in or with teams.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Nighthawks and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, October 15, 2002

By	Beatrice Oshika (Santa Barbara, CA) - See all my reviews

An author who proposes a common lens through which to understand the dynamics of the Nighthawks hockey team and the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is pretty audacious, but Richard Hackman carries if off in this book. Solidly researched and very well written, the book presents an apparently wide range of work groups, including airline crews, musical ensembles and hockey teams, and unifies them by illustrating how they are effective (or not) as teams. What do they have in common? "Their work requires members to generate performances 'live' and in real time, often without the chance to go back and try again if things don't go well." The examples are compellingly interesting, e.g., a reader will never fly a 737 again without noticing the specific roles and choreography of the flight crew. It's a good read, far more entertaining than one would expect from a publication of Harvard Business School Press.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Identifies common mistakes in teams and leaders, December 10, 2004

By	Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Even generally productive teams need to improve their productivity. I'm quite impressed by the framework provided in this book for diagnosing the quality of the direction you're providing, the way you structure your teams, and the way that people are identified with the teams and how all of these impact the team. It's interesting how much is delivered in this book without prescribing precisely how leaders should behave. As a person with a productive team whose concerns are primarily around keeping the team focused and getting more and more effective, this book was great.

The only thing I didn't like is that it sometimes felt like there was a page target they were trying to hit. The same airplane and manufacturing plant examples are repeated over and over, making it seem like there's very little data backing up this research. The same topics are also hit over and over in nearly the same way (the three areas mentioned before). However, that only hurts the presentation; the fundamental topics are quite solid.