FOREWORD

We were honored when Ken, Alan, and Peter asked us to write the foreword to their new book, Go Team! Ken and Alan have been our friends and colleagues for more than thirty years. We are delighted that they are adding this guide to understanding and achieving “Next Level” team status to the Blanchard library on team excellence.

For the past two decades significant changes have been occurring in our workplaces involving how work is structured and how decisions are made. Organizations have had to reinvent themselves to meet the demands of a rapidly changing global environment. Productivity, quality, and human satisfaction have increased in those organizations that have begun to use high involvement management practices. And teams have been the cornerstones of many of these successful change efforts.

Teamwork and collaboration are how work gets done effectively. Team-based practices, when successfully implemented, lead to higher productivity, increased satisfaction, and better employee health, and they promote our democratic values. Most people today participate in at least one and sometimes many different teams. Unfortunately, those teams often do not perform up to their potential. One of the major barriers to effectively implementing teams is that people have not been properly trained to function in teams as contributing team members.

When we wrote, with Ken Blanchard, The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams in 1989, we were interested in providing a basic understanding of

• The characteristics of high performing teams
• The stages of team development
• The leadership behaviors appropriate at each stage

That book, now in its second edition, has become a best-selling standard for understanding the core essentials for building high performing teams, and thousands of people have participated in training programs based on those concepts. The popular sequel, High Five! The Magic of Working Together, written with Sheldon Bowles, builds on those concepts and through an engaging parable shows what individuals and organizations must do to build successful teams.

Go Team! Take Your Team to the Next Level expands on the principles in these two books by building on ideas in the best-selling book by Ken, Alan, and John Carlos: The Three Keys to Empowerment. Now, Ken, Alan, and Peter have created a wonderful field guide that provides practical ideas and activities for moving teams to the Next Level. As you read this book, you will gain both the ability and the confidence to make effective use of information-sharing skills to build trust and responsibility, clear boundary-setting skills to create freedom, and self-managing skills to get great results.

This field guide will serve many teams for many years as an outstanding resource to use to increase team skills, productivity, and morale. It is an ideal follow-up to training in basic team concepts and can help ensure application and sustainability in real-world team settings.

Excellence in leadership, innovation, quality, service, productivity, and human satisfaction in the twenty-first century will best come from people working in teams that can use their potential, knowledge, and motivation. Go Team! is a tool that can help make that happen, and we hope you will use it to Take Your Team to the Next Level.