The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor, and Authenticity Create Great Organizations

Description

Great teams make it look easy. They create brilliant products, deliver excellent service, and achieve extraordinary results. From the outside, it's easy to imagine that these stellar teams must be made up of extraordinary individuals, or mortals blended together by great chemistry. But neither is true. Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, and can mean the difference between success and failure in any company. To write this groundbreaking book, four extraordinary women with a combined century of experience at the highest levels of corporate America have studied thousands of teams. They call the highest-achieving dream teams Loyalist Teams, because on those teams, individuals are loyal to one another, the team, and the larger organization. Members work to ensure each other's success as they work to ensure their own. They operate with absolute candor and refuse to let each other fail. As a result of these behaviors, they enjoy their work and always exceed performance expectations for their companies. The most effective teams share specific characteristics and traits that are identifiable and replicable, and include loyalty, honesty, and trust. In The Loyalist Team , the authors explain the ways teams break down and provide clear examples of the the most toxic, dysfunctional teams that hamper progress. Readers will undoubtedly see their own experiences in revealing profiles of low-performing teams such as Saboteur Teams, Benign Saboteur Teams, and Situational Loyalist Teams. But wherever their current team falls on the spectrum, readers will find an accessible way to understand their own team dynamic, diagnose problems, and take the necessary steps to become the best kind of team--a Loyalist Team--that consistently delivers extraordinary value. Review: The Roadmap to Organizational Success starts here - The difference between success and failure in most organizations comes down to the performance of teams at every level. In my 40 years of corporate life, most companies pay lip service to team performance UNLESS it can be immediately tied to revenue. Worse most companies honestly think they can put stock "inspirational" posters in a wall and have them act as surrogates for guiding principles of behavior Once is a while a book that cuts through the nonsense of what makes teams successful comes along, The Loyalist Team is such a book. This book is a must read, because of all the books on team. dynamics and culture out there, this has the simplest, repeatable approach to diagnosing and changing poor team performance and ultimately a roadmap to better corporate culture. It helps that I have seen the authors in action, and have witnessed first hand the impact this simple yet powerful framework can make. No matter what level of an organization you are in this book has important insights and tools to change the course of a team. Review: Excellent book—thoughtful, clear, and actionable. - Great teams are built around great relationships, and those relationships are built on trust and candor — easier said than done, but certainly not impossible. As the authors discuss, strong teams run towards the hard conversations, refuse to let others fail, give honest feedback, and have fun. The book identifies 4 distinct types of teams, and provides a clear approach to understanding a team’s dynamic and the impact it has on an organization’s success. The key is that they also provide concise and actionable guidelines so that every team can be high-performing, joyful, and deliver exceptional results.