Introduction

Congratulations on deciding to read this book! You have taken a proactive approach to team leadership.

You see, you have two choices as a leader.

You can take a proactive or a reactive approach. The reactive way is the hopeful, passive way – hoping that the team will function well without any particular help or intervention from you. This approach rarely works, which is why we firmly recommend the proactive way, where you take charge and decide to create the climate and circumstances needed for your team to function successfully. And that’s what this book is all about – successful teams. It gives you straight-talking solutions to those common team challenges, which you will be able to relate to.

We have worked with over 200 teams all over the world for the last 20 years, as well as leading teams ourselves for 25 years. In this book we have put together the ten challenges we most often see in teams that, unless addressed, will hinder the team from achieving consistent success. And as we have written this book together, we’ve been able to keep practicing teamwork ourselves too. We’ve continuously challenged each other and we have found that our ideas have triggered new ideas, and together we have created something much richer than we could have done individually.

Everyone is busy, we get that. The ‘busy bug’ is a common workplace disease, and becomes the excuse for not properly solving issues and challenges. Being busy is not the answer to great results though. So please, do yourself a favour; stop being busy and talking about being busy. By investing in your team up front, it makes you more effective and you can do less and achieve more.

The aim of this book is to help you address specific challenges you and your team may face. You can use it as a ‘go to’ source when you encounter a problem, and read the relevant chapter addressing the specific problem you have. Or you can, of course, choose to read the whole book if you are interested in getting your team to work as effectively as possible on all fronts.

Each chapter explores the problem, thoughts and feelings of team members, and gives solutions and behavioural suggestions. There’s also self-assessment and reflection questions to help you think through the challenge more specifically as it pertains to your team. This is how each chapter is structured:

• Chapter outcomes
• Self-assessment
• Example of problem
• Exploring the problem
• Solutions
• Behaviours of team and leader
• Thoughts and feelings of team and leader
• Summary
• Reflection questions
• Self-assessment

Some solutions may seem almost ‘too simple’ and straightforward, but don’t be fooled; sometimes it is the simple solutions that get overlooked as we often think ‘it must be more complicated than that’. We recommend that you look at these simple but effective, proven solutions and implement them. If you do, they can have a major impact on your team.

As you start reading the book, you will find that certain challenges and their solutions link to other challenges and solutions. This is natural. Team dynamics are fluid and as a result, when you start working on one aspect of your team effectiveness, it can have a positive knock-on effect on another area. On the flip side, this also means that even if you only face one of these challenges, unless you address it, it may create other challenges.

Team dynamics are fluid and therefore require continuous work. The most successful teams are constantly reviewing how they are doing, and making necessary adjustments.

What has got us to where we are today as a team, is not going to take us to where we need to be tomorrow and into the future.

If you want to achieve real, lasting change, pay particular attention to behaviours. How we behave and conduct ourselves have an impact on others, creating a ripple effect. It’s when we change our daily behaviours that we can achieve transformational change.

This book applies to all levels in an organisation. It doesn’t matter if you are the CEO, a middle manager, new to leadership or a team member – this book has something practical to offer for everyone.

Above all, when reading this book, don’t just read it!

It’s only when you implement the solutions that the book will show its true value.

Reading about it, thinking about it will not do it – you have to do it.

Even a single person in a team, doing something different and powerful, can start to make a difference and influence team members to do the same. And remember, even doing something seemingly small and simple, can have a big impact.

When you start implementing these solutions, you are acquiring transferable team skills which you can take with you into future teams too.

We wish you great team success.