I’m having a clear out of my old books and updating the ones I believe are still relevant. When I set off on my ‘team building’ journey; and in particular when I talked about ‘self-managing’ teams, the resistance was immense at all levels of an organisation (hence my first book, ‘Shift Your But’).
Once the concept caught on I found I actually couldn’t keep up with the amount of work I was being offered and so I documented my 6 step process of turning ‘Whinging, Whining Groups into High Performing Teams’. This became my second book ‘Finding The Square Root Of A Banana’.
If you are having challenges within your team, or even at home (families are teams too), then you’ll love the banana book. In a nutshell I cover:
- The difference between groups and teams
- Understanding learned behaviours and how challenging they are to change
- The games, dramas and creative ways people find to sabotage results
- The 6 step Team Building process:
- Dealing with never ending change
- How to conduct a ‘bitch’ session, and all teams need to have regular bitch sessions.
- How to then turn that session into an action plan for dealing with roadblocks
- How to communicate effectively and how to deal with conflict
- A creative problem-solving process plus a simple delegation model
- How to re-define your team culture (vision, values, behaviours etc)
- How to have productive meetings where people leave feeling energised rather than exhausted and frustrated
- Dealing with never ending change
There are real life stories in the book; masses of quotes; examples of vision statements; tips on coaching and mentoring; great questions you can ask to challenge old thinking; examples of companies who do great things versus companies who stay stuck in old ways. And much, much more. This is a book about what is possible if people are willing to get out of their own way.
And I’ll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the book:
“The new CEO of a printing business called his workforce together after on month and said ‘I’m ashamed of the stuff that leaves this building, even if customers seem to accept it. In future every item will have a piece of paper headed ‘we are proud to have done this work’ and signed by every member of the work group. He expected an angry reaction but instead got cheers. ‘We were ashamed too but we thought that was all you wanted – acceptable rubbish at the lowest cost.'”
Beyond Certainty. Charles Handy
Ann Andrews CSP
Speaker, author, profiler, Life Member NSANZ
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