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Anyone who leads a team or is part of one understands the day-to-day challenges of managing and working with a group of individuals. How can we get the team to be more than the sum of its parts? Why isn`t the team performing up to its potential? How can we get people to work together more effectively?
According to young Cambridge professor Mark de Rond, key team-management dilemmas such as these are the same in sports as in business. Though sports metaphors are used profusely in everyday business parlance (we level the playing field by sending in the heavy hitters who happily step up to the plate or take one for the team, even as the goal posts have moved), these flip phrases can disguise the serious and substantial lessons that can be learned from the world of sports and applied to business. For example, the iconic team-building phrase favored by business consultants and managers, "there is no I in team," may be lexicographically correct but as a team guiding principle it is profoundly impractical and flawed. Through numerous examples from sports, highlighted by quotes from distinguished coaches and players around the world, de Rond shows what team leaders can learn by focusing on the individuals within them.
Other topics that de Rond explores - using insights and first-hand accounts from professional sports combined with cutting-edge research in social psychology, anthropology, organizational behavior, and the economics of sports - include:
Why the very same qualities that make team members attractive make them horrible team-mates too
Why the best team is hardly ever comprised of the best individual performers
Why the best teams are in constant need of repair
Why likeability trumps competence in even the most technically sophisticated environments
Why a focus on interpersonal harmony will destroy team performance and kill the team
Why conflict happens even when intentions are perfectly aligned
Why size does matter and fewer is better
Why statistics, analytics and other "moneyball" techniques can never replace the role of intuition in predicting individual and team performance
ISBN - 9781422171301
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Pages : 224
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