Great Books on Leading Highly Productive Teams

Teamwork is the key to an innovative and productive workforce. Collaboration among a group of people simply generates more ideas and accomplishes more than any one person can do alone. But it takes real leadership skills to enable a team of diverse people to work together. Here are some books with advice on how to do just that.

6 Books Every Leader Should Read

1. Building Team Power: How to Unleash the Collaborative Genius of Teams for Increased Engagement, Productivity, and Results by Thomas Kayser

This is a straightforward, how-to manual for team leaders, covering the important behaviors that leaders need to know and use for productive teams. It’s short on theory but long on practical advice, detailing the skills that leaders can put into practice immediately.

2. Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams by Bob Frisch

This book gives you a list of best practices for building outstanding teams. It covers ten different paradigms for team building, explaining how to enhance performance, motivate people, cut through gridlock, help people work together, diagnose the causes creating difficulty for failing teams, and more.

3. Teamwork and Teamplay by James Cain and Barry Jolliff

It’s all in the title with this book – a compendium of teamwork and teamplay activities, from the quick and easy to the more complex. The authors give plenty of information on the resources team leaders can use to help them with their teamwork activities.

4. Teamwork 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John Maxwell

This book gives advice on how to build durable teams, motivate team members, channel a team’s creativity, help team members who are spinning their wheels, and determine whether the team can achieve its goals.

5. Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance by Howard M. Guttman

This book burrows down into the internal operations of teams, examining more than 30 examples of high performing teams. The author looks at teams from various levels and perspectives, focusing on five primary factors that determine the performance of teams.

6. Group Dynamics for Teams by Daniel Levi

This book delves into the psychological concepts underlying group dynamics, especially how these motivations play out with teams in the workplace. Although drawing on psychological research, the book focuses on practical applications for organizational behavior. The book looks at issues such as job redesign, training, pay, supervision, and change management.

Are you building your team?

At Opti, we look beyond the resume and the job description, because making a good hire is about more than just a matching skill set. It’s about personality and culture fit, business perspectives, work ethic, management style, long-term company and career goals and more. We see the big picture. Contact Opti today.

 

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