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Book Description

Communicate, congregate and collaborate more effectively than ever

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to enhance team productivity. Building on the concepts presented in Smart Work, which focuses on personal productivity, this book shows you how to turn unproductive team behaviours that create friction into ‘superproductive’ behaviours that promote flow. Productivity is, at its core, a leadership issue — and this book provides practical guidelines that help you build a culture where productivity thrives.

Working together can be a drag — literally. Email noise, unproductive meetings and poorly organised projects can stifle creativity and disrupt everyone’s workflow. But by creating team agreements that raise awareness of the negative impact of our behaviours, you build the desire and capability to change. This book is packed with tips, guidelines and expert insights for leaders and managers at any level.

  • Foster a culture of ‘superproductivity’
  • Create a set of Smart Team principles to guide cooperation
  • Run fewer, shorter and more effective meetings
  • Collaborate more productively on projects
  • Reduce urgency, interruptions and email noise

People want their work to matter, they want to make an impact and they want to do it all with a healthy work-life balance — productivity is the key to making it all happen.  Smart Teams shows you how to implement the culture shift that will allow your team to flourish.

Table of Contents

  1. About the author
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. How to use this book
  4. Introduction
    1. Can you relate?
    2. Productivity problems at the team level
    3. We create friction rather than flow
  5. Part I Moving from friction to flow
    1. Chapter 1 Enabling productive flow
      1. Productivity friction
      2. Poor productivity behaviours
      3. Friction vs flow cultures
      4. Beyond personal productivity
      5. Level 1: DISRUPTIVE
      6. Level 2: PASSIVE
      7. Level 3: PRODUCTIVE
      8. Level 4: COLLABORATIVE
      9. Level 5: SUPERPRODUCTIVE
    2. Chapter 2 Qualities of a smart team
      1. We are purposeful
      2. We are mindful
      3. We are punctual
      4. We are reliable
    3. Chapter 3 Changing team behaviours
      1. Get specific to change behaviours
      2. What is a productivity principle?
      3. Generating principles for your team
      4. Flipping problems into principles
      5. Make this a priority for your team
  6. Part II Working better together
    1. Chapter 4 Communicate: Make less noise
      1. Email overload
      2. Alternatives to email
      3. Four communication tools
      4. A more thoughtful approach to communications
      5. Planning effective communications (why)
      6. Writing effective communications (what)
      7. Sending effective communications (who)
      8. Noise reduction strategies
    2. Chapter 5 Congregate: Make meetings count
      1. What's wrong with our meeting culture?
      2. Let's aim for 100 per cent fewer meetings
      3. 25 per cent fewer meetings
      4. 25 per cent shorter meeting durations
      5. 25 per cent fewer participants
      6. 25 per cent less time wasted
      7. Make your meetings more effective
      8. Running an awesome meeting
      9. Mindful interruptions
      10. Are all agenda items the same?
      11. Focus your meeting with an agenda
    3. Chapter 6 Collaborate: Make projects great
      1. Alignment, agreement and awareness
      2. Project collaboration: make them visible
      3. The best tool for the job
    4. Chapter 7 Key skills for effective cooperation
      1. Managing urgency
      2. Developing an active mindset
      3. Negotiating our workloads
      4. Delegating in the right way
  7. Part III Building a smart team culture
    1. Chapter 8 Creating a more productive culture
      1. Create ripples
      2. The role of leadership on this journey
    2. Chapter 9 Some productivity projects
      1. Project 1: Productivity principles
      2. Project 2: Interruption reduction
      3. Project 3: Dial down the urgency
      4. Project 4: Meeting diet
      5. Project 5: Meeting agenda
      6. Project 6: Turn down the noise
      7. Project 7: Pull versus push
      8. Project 8: The projects project
  8. Postscript
  9. Index
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