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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Five common problems your team is susceptible to--and the one thing you can do to fix all of them There are so many ways a team can go wrong. Does your team make decisions so slowly that nothing ever gets done, or does it go too fast and miss critical issues that come back to bite you later? Does your team bicker endlessly or smile and nod while avoiding the tough issues? Too often, team dysfunction leads to abysmal productivity and zero innovation for your organization, as well as misery and wasted time for you. Most team members sit and wait, feeling trapped in a team that just isn't working. You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done presents a radical new idea: you can change your team. Author Liane Davey shows how you, from any seat at the table, even without support from your colleagues or your team leader, can transform even a toxic team. It starts with living up to five responsibilities that will change the workings of even the most dysfunctional team. * Addresses the five most common ways your team can become toxic * Gives you a diagnostic to see if your team is at risk * Doles out practical suggestions to deal with the crisis in the short-term * Instructs you on how to disrupt the patterns that leave you in an endless cycle of dysfunction * Replaces those patterns with positive interactions and even productive conflict * Gives you the right words to say to change your team for the better--starting today * Written by Liane Davey, PhD, a highly sought-after consultant and Principal of Knightsbridge Leadership Solutions and the Vice President of Global Solutions and Team Effectiveness Designed for front line employees, middle managers, executives, or anyone who works regularly in teams, You First will help you figure out how to make your team happier, healthier, and more productive.
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Seitenzahl: 298
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Change Yourself, Change Your Team
The Great Promise of Teams
The Sad Reality of Teams
Teams Are Here to Stay
What I've Learned about Fixing Teams
There's One Catch
The Road Ahead
Change Your Team
Chapter 2: Toxic Teams
How Sick Is Your Team?
Coping
Chapter 3: The Crisis Junkie Team
The Value of Crisis
Origins of a Crisis Junkie Problem
Impact of Being a Crisis Junkie Team
Diagnostic
Triage and Emergency Medicine
Chapter 4: The Bobble Head Team
The Desire for Harmony
Origins of a Bobble Head Problem
Impact of Being a Bobble Head Team
Diagnostic
Triage and Emergency Medicine
Chapter 5: The Spectator Team
Overload
Origins of a Spectator Team
Impact of Being a Spectator Team
Diagnostic
Triage and Emergency Medicine
Chapter 6: The Bleeding Back Team
Civility
Origins of a Bleeding Back Team
Impact of Being a Bleeding Back Team
Diagnostic
Triage and Emergency Medicine
Chapter 7: The Royal Rumble Team
Engagement
Origins of a Royal Rumble Team
Impact of Being a Royal Rumble Team
Diagnostic
Triage and Emergency Medicine
Chapter 8: The You in Team
Team Building
It's about You
Your Responsibilities
Chapter 9: Start with a Positive Assumption
It's Over before It's Begun
Start with a Positive Assumption
Competence, Reliability, and Integrity of Your Teammates
Health Check: Are You Starting with a Positive Assumption?
Chapter 10: Add Your Full Value
Pale Imitations
Add Your Full Value
A Word about Vulnerability
Adding the Wrong Value
Health Check: Are You Adding Your Full Value?
Chapter 11: Amplify Other Voices
The Need for Speed
Drowning Out Minority Voices—The Power and the Peril of the Majority
The Importance of Diversity
Amplify Other Voices
What Is Diverse?
Health Check: Are You Amplifying Other Voices?
Chapter 12: Know When to Say “No”
Spread Too Thin
Know When to Say “No”
How to Say “No”
Help! It Didn't Work
Times to Say “Yes”
Health Check: Do You Know When to Say “No?”
Chapter 13: Embrace Productive Conflict
We Stink at Conflict
Why We Don't Fight the Good Fight
Embrace Productive Conflict
The Path Forward
Health Check: Are You Embracing Productive Conflict?
Chapter 14: You First
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions
Index
Cover image: Hand © iStockphoto.com/saluha, paper © iStockphoto.com/nicolewaring
Cover design: C. Wallace
Copyright © 2013 by Liane Davey of Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
Interior Cartoons illustrated by Peggy McEwan.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Davey, Liane Margaret, 1972-
You first : inspire your team to grow up, get along, and get stuff done / Liane Davey.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-118-63670-1 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-71492-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-71475-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-71479-9 (ebk)
1. Teams in the workplace—Management. 2. Employee motivation. 3. Organizational behavior. 4. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.
HD66.D376′2013
658.4'022—dc23
2013011038
To the home team: Craig, Kira, and Mac
Chapter 1
Change Yourself, Change Your Team
The Great Promise of Teams
“A team can make better decisions, solve more complex problems, and do more to enhance creativity and build skills than individuals working alone.…They have become the vehicle for moving organizations into the future.…Teams are not just nice to have. They are hard-core units of the production.”
—Blanchard1
Better decisions, increased productivity, and heightened engagement: Teams promise a lot. At their best, teams make many things easier. Good teams solve problems2 better than individuals. They improve quality.3 Teams can increase your engagement and motivation. One study of British rowers even found a physiological advantage to teamwork,4 with team members releasing more endorphins than individuals rowing the same race. We're wired for teamwork.
Beyond any physical benefit, teams have an intellectual advantage because they make more information available to you, help you generate more novel ideas, and give you access to more people who can identify good ideas—and weed out bad ones.
But the proof of the benefits of teamwork isn't just in the numbers. If you've experienced at least one strong team in your career, you know the feeling in your gut. Being part of a great team is electric. You feel more connected, you feel the upward spiral of ideas getting better and better. You know that a bunch of people have your back. It's easy to get stuff done. Once you've felt what it's like to be on a truly great team, you'll always want that feeling back.
That's the feeling you're trying to evoke when you plaster the office walls with cheery posters of mountain climbers, rowers, and planes flying in formation.
The Sad Reality of Teams
For many people today, the reality of working on a team is nothing like what's shown in those posters. Teams can feel pretty crappy. Instead of collaboration, you're in competition with your colleagues. Instead of diversity of thought and breadth of ideas, there's tunnel vision. Instead of friendship and camaraderie, there's gossip and backstabbing.
And it's not as though the pain is all worth it because you're so much more productive. In many instances, teams are slower and less productive than individuals. Seriously? All that drama for nothing! Teams aren't even more accurate than individuals. And that promise of increased engagement and motivation goes out the window when lack of role clarity, mistrust, and unhealthy conflict sour your relationships. Research has even debunked the value of the cornerstone of teamwork—the brainstorming session.5Teams are failing us.
Teams Are Here to Stay
There's no going back to a world where we all did most of our work independently. Teams have multiplied as our work has grown more complicated. If you go way back to 77 AD, one man—Pliny the Elder—managed to write an encyclopedia of all that was known to mankind. Today, that's just impossible to fathom! No single person could possibly know all there is to know even in one very specific field. We can't know enough without teams.
The huge increase in the use of teams is also part of a seismic cultural change. Command and control organizations didn't need teams to get things done—they had memoranda. The boss sent out a memo and everyone got on board. “Yes, sir, right away, sir!” When was the last time you saw a memo? Today, our organizational cultures are more sensitive to engagement and buy-in. We have to use influence instead of authority to get things done. Meetings have replaced memos. We can't get things done without teams.
I recently reached out to human resources leaders in 50 large and midsized organizations and asked them whether teams would be less, equally, or more important in the future than they are today. Eighty-nine percent of respondents said that teams would be more (or much more) important in the future. Teams are here to stay.
Teams are the way work gets done in our increasingly complex, fast-paced, global world. They are the basic unit of our organizations and a critical piece of the productivity puzzle. For many of us, our work teams are also the closest thing we have to community in our urban, disconnected, two-hour-commute lives. My teammates are my colleagues, my sounding boards, my friends, and even the aunties and uncles to my two daughters. For both our organizations and ourselves, there is a lot riding on our ability to make teams work.
What I've Learned about Fixing Teams
The problems facing teams are serious, but instead of fixing the serious teamwork problems with serious solutions, most team-building sessions focus on fun or frivolous activities like cooking classes or white-water rafting. I guess the idea is that if you can have fun outside the office, maybe you can recapture the fun back in the office. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
More often than not, people return with horror stories about team issues being magnified by these types of sessions. The cooking class highlights how your team can't get its act together and ends with everyone eating a cold meal just to rub their noses in it. The karaoke night widens the gap that already exists between the outgoing party types and the more hesitant introverts. The Popsicle-stick boat sinks along with your hopes of building a better team. Expecting silly exercises to fix serious issues is ridiculous.
On the other side of the spectrum are the “tissue issue” team builders. These are the team-building facilitators who think that if you remove the tables, sit in a circle, and have an authentic dialogue with one another that everything will be fine. These folks come prepared with their box of tissues because they don't feel like they've created a breakthrough until someone cries. These sessions can make things a whole lot worse in a hurry. It's just not acceptable that these are your only options when you want to invest in your team.
For the last 17 years, I've been studying and working with teams. I started back when I was a graduate student in psychology studying the dynamics that affect innovation in high-tech product development teams. That research was my first evidence of the profound connection between team effectiveness and business success. For the past decade, I've been working as an advisor to executive teams. At first, I focused mostly on facilitating strategy, but it didn't take long for me to learn that the quality of the strategy process hinged on the dynamics of the team. For the past 7 years I've been helping top teams improve their alignment to strategy, reduce their dysfunction, and fulfill the promise of teamwork in creating productive organizations.
By the time I get a call to help a team, things are usually pretty bad. Some teams openly admit the severity of the problem. But many try to downplay their distress. They say things like, “We're a good team, and we're just trying to become a great team.” It doesn't take long to learn that the patient is in bad shape. Sure, they're walking and talking, getting things done, but they've got badly blocked arteries, and the only solution is the team equivalent of open-heart surgery. That's how I spend most of my days. I wheel teams into the operating room, crack them open, and try to repair the damage. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Just like eating well and exercising every day can greatly reduce the risk of heart disease, simple, healthy practices on a team can prevent or at least reduce the impact of the most common team dysfunctions. If you get into the habit of doing these small things every day, you'll prevent your team from becoming dysfunctional. These steps are more effective than gimmicky team-building programs. Going on a rock-climbing retreat to solve your team's problems is like trying to get healthy with diet shakes and a ThighMaster. Living up to the responsibilities outlined in this book will prevent your team from reaching a crisis point where you need to invest in a costly team intervention.
There's One Catch
I sat across the table from the vice president of human resources of a large manufacturer. I hadn't worked with his team before, but from the interviews I had done with the members, I could tell things weren't good. The team was micromanaging and spending too much time in the weeds. They were also trapped in a bad dynamic where most members didn't trust, or even like, one another. I wasn't the first expert they'd hired to help.
I met with him to go over what I'd heard in the one-on-one interviews and get ready for the session. As we sat in his office, we stared out the windows at the water in silence until he said what we were both thinking: “This has to work. We won't get another chance.”
Unfortunately, he thought that statement was about me. I was the team effectiveness expert, and I needed to fix the team. I needed to stop their yelling. I needed to cure their mistrust. I needed to make them forgive past indiscretions and move forward with a clean slate.
I can't fix a team. No team expert, no matter how skilled, can. You see, my secret weapon isn't a magic wand—it's a mirror. No matter how badly I want to cure a team, all I can do is create the conditions for the team to cure itself. I told the VP of HR what I tell every client: I'll give you everything you need to understand how and why you need to change. But you have to make the change yourselves.
Each and every team I've seen recover from dysfunction has been led by one brave soul who looked in the mirror and didn't like what he or she saw. And instead of waiting for everyone else to change, that person decided to go first. Each and every team that got healthy had one member who would trust without being trusted. One person who would respond to hostility with curiosity. One person who would stand up for the teammate who others were shutting down.
If you are willing to be that person on your team, congratulations. If you are ready to make a change, this book will be your inspiration for why to try, your handbook for how to do it, and your measuring stick for how you're doing.
The Road Ahead
In the first half of this book, the section on Toxic Teams, you will diagnose what's going on in your team. I'll introduce the most common team diseases and share the early warning signs, the symptoms, and some things you can do—even without the support of your colleagues or team leader—to get your team back on the right path. By the end of the Toxic Teams section, you'll be tuned in to the dynamics that are at play on your team. You'll know if your team is at risk of becoming one of the following:
In the second half of the book, you'll learn the daily regimen you can use to keep your team healthy or to start fixing your team if it's broken. No single tactic will cure a Toxic Team, but if you live up to each of the following five responsibilities, you can cure every one of the different dysfunctions. Each of the responsibilities is simple in theory and difficult in practice. When applied, each will have a profound impact on your team and on you. It doesn't matter where you sit at the table; every team member can and should live up to these five responsibilities:
Change Your Team
Teams are the way we get work done. Organizations need teams to live up to their promise instead of getting mired in dysfunction. Getting teams healthy will pay off richly in terms of productivity, innovation, and risk management.
But productivity, innovation, and risk management all pale in comparison to the true reason we need our teams healthy. Unhealthy Toxic Teams make our working lives miserable. Stress in the workplace costs our economy billions of dollars, and it's costing you what are supposed to be the best years of your life. You know what it's like: two hours into the team meeting and that one guy is droning on and on without listening to anyone, and you want to strangle him. You're spending hundreds of dollars on pain relievers and massages just to deal with the tension.
And it's almost impossible to leave a Toxic Team at the office. You carry the stress and anxiety with you when you walk through the door at home. You are distracted at dinner, quick-tempered with your partner, and harsh with your kids. It has to stop.
I'm passionate about teams because I have experienced the misery of working on a Toxic Team. Early in my career, I was a member of a Toxic Team. I kept on downplaying the effect our team leader was having on me until one day I saw a speech given by Dr. John Izzo. I am eternally grateful to him, because he gave me the kick in the pants I needed to get out of that environment. He said, “Every day, everywhere you go, you spread a virus. You decide if that virus is positive or negative.” I realized that the toxic environment on the team had poisoned me. Just walking into the office made me grouchy. I spent more time complaining than making things better. I was spreading a negative virus.
Twenty-six days later, I submitted my resignation. It took me about two months to really appreciate the terrible toll that team had taken on me. I realized I had been wasting all my energy trying to protect myself from the team leader's wicked accusations, and I had no energy left for anything else.
I hadn't been doing my best work. I hadn't been the kind of colleague and mentor to my team that I should have been. Worse, I had carried the weight of the day home with me at night. My daughter would ask to walk to the park or ride her tricycle, and I would tell her I was too tired and switch on the television to placate her, something I had sworn to myself I would never do.
Since that moment eight years ago, I've been committed to doing my part to end the misery of bad teams. I've learned that Toxic Teams are inefficient, they waste resources, and they leave people feeling unproductive, disengaged, and exhausted. No one deserves to feel that way.
I left my Toxic Team, but you don't have to. You can change your team from the inside. One person—no matter where you sit—one person can change the trajectory of a whole team. Starting to behave differently, to unpack your baggage, and to disagree positively will make it easier for your teammates to do the same. Good behavior from you will encourage good behavior from others, and you'll be amazed how much better things will be. If you have the courage, you can change your team.
If you change yourself, you will change your team.
Chapter 2
Toxic Teams
I was sitting at my desk, working away, when the phone rang. It was the CEO of a small financial organization.1 He'd called a week before to ask about our work on team effectiveness, and I'd sent him some material on our Team Inoculation® program. We designed this program to help get new teams off on the right foot. We affectionately refer to it as the flu shot for teams because it's meant to immunize teams against common dysfunctions.
He didn't waste any time getting to the point on this second call. “Thanks for sending the material on the flu shot,” he said. “I don't think that's going to cut it. Do you have a rabies shot ?”
I immediately imagined a team of executives sitting around the table frothing at the mouth. It wasn't quite that bad, but it was pretty horrible. Members of the team had stopped trusting one another and communicating all but the most necessary information.
Before the first session, we interviewed the CEO, the board chair, and the entire executive team. They painted a pretty bleak picture. The organization used to be listed as one of the nation's best employers. Now engagement had plummeted. The most recent internal survey asked employees to agree or disagree with the statement “Our organization has the leadership we need to be successful.” Not a single employee agreed. Not one!
No surprise that the business was in a downward spiral. Thanks to internal squabbles, the team couldn't deliver the tools the sales force needed to keep up with the increasingly tough competition. Sales had been falling for three years. There was no time to waste in getting this team back to health.
We had our first session at a really nice hotel surrounded by stunning views of a forested section of the city. Things inside weren't quite so picturesque. As members of the team arrived, they said hello to my colleague, Bryan, and me, but ignored each other, burying their heads in newspapers or their smartphones.
We took it slowly for the first day. We knew we'd need to build trust before we could get at what was really going on. We started by talking about the purpose of the organization because it was something everyone felt strongly about and could agree on. They came to some valuable conclusions about what their team should be focused on. By the end of the day, they were comfortable enough to express some of their frustration: “This was all well and good, but we didn't talk about what's wrong. We need to talk about what's not working.” They wanted to point fingers, to blame someone, to unleash their emotions. But they weren't ready to do that without making things much, much worse.
In our second session, we used an assessment tool to help the team understand the feelings behind their coworkers' behavior and set them up for the difficult conversations they needed to have. By session three, we were ready to delve into the issues. And boy, were there issues. The members of this team were walking wounded.
Everyone on the team had significant grievances. They felt wronged, and they wanted to see public trials for the offending teammates. I think most of them were expecting Bryan and me to pronounce judgment on the offenders right there in the session. The alleged crimes varied. Some had been caught telling people that their teammates didn't know how to do their jobs. One vice president had instructed her direct reports to ignore instructions from one of the other VPs. Another refused to share an important document with a colleague because she didn't trust her with the sensitive material. Even the CEO was in on the action, asking the board to let him terminate the CFO without addressing the issues directly with him.
We saw anger, frustration, and distress. And not just in the boardroom. The executive team's direct reports took the brunt of the conflict when they were asked to ignore or question their peers and thus spread the misery in the organization. Of course, this dysfunction affected team members' sleep, appetite, and health. Their relationships and their families suffered. The whole situation had become toxic.
Toxic Teams are like cancers: The exact cause of the disease and the prognosis can vary widely. When you take diverse individuals and combine them into teams, you get infinite permutations of dysfunction. Some teams are dysfunctional from the start, thanks to immature, abusive, or conflict-avoidant individuals. Other teams work well until something sours the quality of their members' interactions. Even small changes in the membership or the context of the team can turn a normally healthy team into a dysfunctional one.
You know you're on a Toxic Team when:
you dread going to work on Monday mornings (and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays)you work your butt off but face the same issues and problems time after timeyou go to the washroom on another floor to avoid Gossip Centralyou copy the boss and the boss's boss on every e-mail to cover your backsideyou're embarrassed to tell people which team you're onTeams turn toxic when something goes wrong in one of two dimensions: the alignment or the dynamic.
Alignment
You know your team is aligned when you're focused on things that are important to the organization, you are each clear about your roles, and those roles complement one another instead of conflicting. Without alignment, it feels like you're just spinning your wheels.
You'll find yourself in a Toxic Team if there is too little alignment because you'll either be dropping balls (“That wasn't my responsibility”) or stepping on one another's toes (“That's MY turf!”). A team with poor alignment wastes a lot of energy running off in all directions. If you often find yourself working and reworking projects or putting out fires, that's a sign that alignment is broken somewhere in the chain.
Okay, so a quick meeting to review the team's purpose should clear up any problems, right? Wrong. Your team can also turn toxic if there is too much alignment—when alignment becomes uniformity. When your team is too tightly aligned, there isn't enough diversity of thought to trigger innovation or expose underlying risk. At the extreme, every team member is thinking exactly the same thing. You might as well just have one person work on the problem alone. You might be surprised how often over-alignment is the problem on teams.
Getting alignment right means finding that sweet spot where everybody's thinking independently, but still working toward a common purpose. Each of the Toxic Teams that I will describe in the following chapters has gotten this balance wrong somehow. Two team types in particular have alignment issues at the heart of their dysfunction. Too little alignment is the fundamental problem of a Crisis Junkie team, and too much is the issue for Bobble Heads.
Dynamic
The other major issue is how your teammates interact with one another. You know you have a healthy dynamic when team members communicate openly, candidly, and respectfully. This contributes to high levels of trust and makes your team a mature and positive place to be. But a good dynamic isn't just valuable for its own sake; you'll see the impact of the dynamic on creativity, decision making, and execution. That's why a good dynamic is critical to the health of the team and the success of your organization.
A healthy dynamic has to be more than skin deep. I have heard many, many people claim to be on wonderful, healthy teams, only to find that the smiles mask serious problems. The desire to maintain harmonious relationships can make your team avoid difficult topics and gloss over issues that require hearty debate. If you're engaged and cheery but unwilling to go beyond a superficial view of the world, your team is as much of a risk to your organization as the team that devolves into fisticuffs. A counterproductive dynamic is a factor in every Toxic Team. It's a hallmark of a Spectator team, where there is too little conflict, and a Royal Rumble team, where there is too much.
How Sick Is Your Team?
You might already be reacting to the language I'm using to describe unhealthy teams. “Sure, we might not be up for Team of the Year, but I don't think I'd say we're toxic!” The term toxic makes a lot of people squeamish. Toxic doesn't mean your team is doomed!
Think about the word toxic and the idea of toxins. You're surrounded by toxic substances every day. They're usually not concentrated enough to knock you out. But you become less and less healthy as those toxins build in your body. The same is true of your team. Maybe your team isn't obviously sick yet, maybe you're still functioning fine, but are the toxins building up? Is it time to clean up your act so your team can stay healthy and productive for years to come?
Read the first half of this book with an open mind. You might not see a mirror image of any of the Toxic Teams when you look around your meeting room, but do you see hints that your team is starting to deteriorate? If you understand the origins of Toxic Teams, you can spot a problem before it really hampers your team.
If you do see your team reflected in the descriptions of the Toxic Teams, don't fret. Admitting that your team is unhealthy is nothing to be ashamed of. Few teams become dysfunctional intentionally or even knowingly. Your dysfunctional behavior is a natural response to the pressure you're under: the pressure to drop everything when a crisis strikes, the pressure to get along, to act civilly, to be engaged and passionate. You're expected to be all these things while your work is getting more complex, more interdependent, more urgent. The operative word is more. More, more, more!
Coping
So if you are like most of the team members I work with (heck, if you're like me), you make little compromises just to survive the day. You drop your opposition to an idea because the boss seems so committed to it. You let a nasty comment slide because the guy will ignore what you say anyway. You lob a personal attack at a colleague because it will scuttle their idea faster than trying to make a rational case. You take out your stress by gossiping with a teammate over coffee—what happens at Starbucks stays at Starbucks.
The first time you do any of these things, it's understandable and forgivable. You're under so much pressure, you're inevitably going to lose your temper or let something slide at some point. Cut yourself some slack. It's what you do the second time and the third time that matters. The second time you use a coping strategy, it's a pattern, and you need to get serious about doing the right thing instead of taking the easy way out. The third time, it's a habit, and you're already in trouble. The good news is that there is a way back.
It's time to dive in, figure out what's really going on, and start making it better. Here's how to do that.
In the following five chapters, I will take you on a tour of the most common types of Toxic Teams. We'll peek in the windows of their meetings, hide out behind their water coolers, and even listen in on the voices in their heads. You'll spot the normal, even desirable motives and behaviors that can actually set your team on a path to dysfunction. Then you'll see the peril that lies ahead if your team becomes toxic—the costs to your organization and to you personally. By that point, you might start to recognize some of the descriptions.
For each Toxic Team, there is a quick diagnostic quiz. Does your team have a full-blown version of the disease or just a few of the early warning signs? If you reflect on how your team behaves, can you confidently say that there is no risk of developing a particular problem? As you complete each diagnostic, tally your scores and get a sense of just how bad it is. You can feel good if you're only checking off one or two items in the Early Warning section. If, on the other hand, you're checking off the Moderate to Extreme symptoms in the lower sections of the quiz, you need to act quickly.
You might find that your team is particularly vulnerable to one toxic pattern. You might see some aspect of each of the Toxic Teams. Your team's dysfunction may vary depending on the particular situation or issue you're dealing with. There are as many ways for teams to be toxic as there are views through a kaleidoscope. And each shift in the world, the organization, or the membership of the team changes the picture.
This book isn't just about Toxic Teams; it's also about how to build healthy ones. Although the second half of the book will show you how to cure your team's dysfunction, you won't have to wait that long to get started. In each of the Toxic Team chapters, you'll find instructions for how to triage your situation and administer some emergency medicine. If you are the team leader, or if you've got your boss on board, you can make some formal and structural changes to hardwire good behavior.
