The Best Team Wins

February 1, 2018
The ability to work well in teams is an increasingly essential skill for today's workplace, and managers' role in team-heavy environments is shifting accordingly. Gostick and Elton (The Orange Revolution, 2010) analyzed employee-engagement surveys and interviewed high-performing managers to identify a set of traits common to successful team managers. What they found: soft skills are key; employees want to be treated like individuals, not like interchangeable cogs in a giant wheel; and people perform best when they feel valued and heard. Each chapter in this guide is a deep dive into one specific trait, ranging from skillfully managing across generations (the authors focus on ways that millennials are changing workplaces) to willingness for and encouragement of healthy disagreement and debate to managing to the one knowing, understanding, and respecting what individual employees bring to the team. Case studies abound, and the authors wrap up with a tool kit featuring 101 ideas that managers can use to inspire and develop their teams. The style is accessible, the ideas are easy to implement, and the results could be transformational, both for managers and their employees.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)