Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.
– Henry Ford (American industrialist, 1863-1947)
Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
-Vince Lombardi (American Football Coach, 1913-1970)
Overview
In the previous book, Fostering Creativity in Self and Organization: Your Professional Edge, we explored several concepts related to individual development:
- Your Improvisational Capacity
- Your Design Proficiency
- Your Experimental and Scientific Mind
- Your Aesthetic Awareness
- Your Cognitive, Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, and Emotional Strengths
However, much of the work of the world gets done by teams or organizations. Teams are the fundamental building blocks of organizations. Without teams, nothing would get done. How do we go about building great high performance teams? We do so by applying the principles of this book.
The goal for this book is to apply the IDEAS Method to the formation and functioning of creative high performance teams. We break this task in to the following topics:
- General Characteristics of High Performance Teams
- Team Selection and Development
- The Power of Roles in Team Development and Effectiveness
- Unique Characteristics of Specific Teams
We begin with an overview of the general characteristics of teams and of high performance teams in particular. Next, we look at team selection and development. There are several ways to select the members of the team depending on the task to which it is assigned. Generally speaking, the more complex the task, the more diverse the team needs to be. What we mean by diversity is critical. We look at criteria for selecting team members and look at how teams can be developed to meet certain goals and tasks.
Next, we look at the power of roles in team development and functioning. Finally, we examine the unique characteristics of high performance improvisational, design and research teams.
