Folks,

Good day. Two of my self improvement books got listed on Amazon recently and are now available in Kindle format. The links are given below.  The regular PDF versions and sample chapters are also available via my web cave.

This is a draft of the framing piece for the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) collaborative research initiative launched by the Leadership Learning Community.  LNE seeks to promote a leadership model that is more inclusive, networked and collective.  This piece is currently being collectively developed by a variety of LNE partners.

Consider this a bonus (9th) post. While I was putting up the previous eight posts over three weeks, my 90 year-old mom was admitted to a hospital in Ottawa, Ontario. I won’t go into any details, but my reason for writing this post is because of something one of the nurses said to me when Mom was admitted: “We practice team-based medicine.” Well, with those words I was all ears and eyes to how my mom was going to be treated.

Today I’m going to confuse the heck out of you. I’m pulling a 180, not to be ornery but rather to question some of the past (and current) conventional wisdom on teams. So hang on, here we go!

Avaip ilable over on my video blog site Viral Leadership TV.

The past five posts explored what it means to be a team, the five levels of teamwork, how to build performance, the four major team player types, and the four stages of team development.

It’s important that leaders set the proper context–the atmosphere–for teamwork. Remember, team work is not an end to itself. It’s built around the need to accomplish something. A common purpose, mutual accountability, interdependence and trust serve as the foundation to building a strong team.

Today, we’ll look at the four stages of team development and incorporate the four team player styles that were presented earlier on in this series.

I talked about building team performance in my last post. Today, we look at what kind of team player you are.

An effective team needs diversity in its membership, a combination of work and personality styles. The following four team player styles are not intended to be absolutes but rather preferences that people have towards how they work with others. Each style has a brief description of its strengths and weaknesses.

In my last post, I talked about The Five Levels of Teams: Where Are You on the Team Curve?. Today, we move into the really challenging part of creating teamwork. Are you ready?

In the previous post we looked at the six basic elements of what constitutes a team, and specifically the two key ingredients of teamwork: a common purpose and interdependency of effort. Now we’ll move into understanding the five levels of teams.

Using the questions posed in the first post will help a group determine if it is a team or has the potential to become one. The next step is to understand the degree of teamwork to which a group of people can aspire.