Leading teams in a week - Nigel Cumberland

Leading a team just got easier
We live in a world of teams made up of all kinds of people. We see this every day on TV, in newspapers and on the web - it might news about a winning sports team, a company's leadership team who have succeeded in buying another company or it might be a about a group of homeowners who have won a battle against a big developer.

This book is aimed at helping all of us no matter what kinds of teams we might need to lead - it might be a group of people running a country, playing a sport for university, organizing a Church fete, leading a start-up company, or managing a global multinational group. All such teams have leaders, who are those individuals given the task of ensuring that their team works well together to achieve whatever goals and objectives are required. Very few if any of us will spend our entire lives without at some point leading other people even if only for a short time and in many cases we often lead others without having a formal leadership title.

In seven chapters, this book will walk you through the entire process of successfully leading and managing a team, showing you the key dos and don'ts and spelling out where you need to put special attention and focus. These seven chapters cover:
- How to get started with a team, exploring what a great team looks like and how it performs, and how to create a new team from scratch with individuals who bring their own habits, skills and expectations
- The stages of development of a team and how a new manager can gain the respect and understanding of a team
- The importance of aligning a team and setting common goals and expectations with clear agreement on a mission, vision and values.
- How to create a team culture and processes of excellent communication, with clearly understood expectations, well run team meetings and discussions, and the minimizing of any conflict and gossip
- How to work with remote or virtual team members where face-to-face meetings are difficult to arrange
- How to identify and work with problematic and nonperforming members of your team and how to balance
fairness and discipline
- How to ensure that each team member's job role is clear and that the work is efficiently delegated and shared among the team members
- How to grow your team through excellent training and development, including coaching, mentoring and on-thejob training
- How to turn a good team into a team with a culture of excellence
- How to create a self-functioning team which can operate in your absence and in which you have groomed a successor to take over from you if needed.