Best book on teams

Katzenback, J.R. & Smith, D.K. (1993, Rev.). The Wisdom of Teams. New York: HarperBusines.

Team building in organizations too often attends to the interrelationships of individuals and neglects performance. Organizations that create a culture that monitors and values group achievement are more flexible, innovative and efficient, Katzenbach and Smith say.

They lay out the fundamentals of high-performing teams, discovered through comparisons of several groups that have achieved much more than the individuals alone could have achieved. These teams bucked corporate culture, overcame insurmountable odds, introduced new products, or fashioned new niches in old industries. The common elements they discovered were that high-performing teams were small in number of members, skill sets were complementary, teams were committed to a common purpose and performance goals, they were committed to a common approach, and team members held each other mutually accountable.

This book is most useful for a leader who has a good team that is ready to go to the next level. Leaders of dysfunctional teams would be too distant from this roadmap to find it useful. But even a leader in that situation may apply the principles to any special task force or work group they participate in. Most of the successful teams profiled in this book were cross-disciplinary groups put together to tackle a specific problem or informally convened to circumvent organizational roadblocks. This book has been so popular that it has been revised several times. A new revision is in order, as the 2002 version still has a glowing account of a high-performing team at Enron.