When Teams Work: How to develop and lead a high-performing team

Discover the secrets to high performing teams from the success stories of sport, military and restaurants – and what to do if your team isn’t working.

Teams are everywhere: At work we are part of many different teams: the department team, the sales team, the planning team and the project team. At play we join the football team, the netball team, the swimming team, the bridge team and the dance team. Socially we support teams, watch teams and are served by teams in restaurants, hotels, shops and at events.

But how much do we really know about them, what makes a successful team and why do teams fail?

Effective teamworking is a perennial issue – there are so many difficulties and traps. We have all worked in teams and seen these problems at first hand and have suffered from them. This book will help you to

• identify the most common issues and give you and your team the tools to improve them and achieve better teamwork and performance.
• get the best out of yourself and others and avoid the common pitfalls that prevent teams from being the best they can be.

We will look at how sports and business teams are developed and work, as well as giving examples and learning lessons from specialist teams in the many different areas such as the military, restaurants, orchestra’s, aerobatics and many more. These examples will be woven in throughout the book, and lessons drawn about what we can learn for our own teams.

Developing high performance teams and effective teamwork is a perennial issue for team leaders and team members alike. Most of us work in teams yet few of us have the capacity to fully assimilate what it takes to resolve common issues such as conflict, low engagement, lack of purpose and accountability in teams.

This book is for team players, team leaders and anyone who is setting up and supporting a team. It sets out all that you need to know to create a successful team and how to fix it if things start to go wrong.

We think the combined experience of the authors and their direct experience of working with both sports and organisational teams is unique. The combination of an academic perspective with a high level practical experience of coaching and leading high performance teams brings clarity and understanding to the concepts , balanced with a pragmatic perspective on how to put these into practice The book draws together the combined experience of Nigel Melville as a High Performance sports coach and Chief Executive , and Mike Brent as an academic, author of several bestselling business books and specialist in team dynamics.

Mike Brent specialises in leadership, team-building, influencing, coaching, cross cultural management, leading change and personal development. His interests include how to foster self-awareness and creativity, and how to challenge effectively. Mike is widely published in the areas of influencing, coaching and leadership and the co-author of The Leader's Guide to Coaching & Mentoring, The Leader's Guide to Influence and The Leader's Guide to Managing People (FT Publishing).

Nigel Melville is a former England national rugby union team scrum half and captain and currently serves as Director of Professional Rugby for Rugby Football Union. On retirement, Melville entered coaching and as Director of Rugby at London Wasps, Melville coached the team to their first professional Premiership title in 1996, followed by three National Cup Final appearances, winning two. In March 2002 he moved to Gloucester Rugby, winning the Zurich Championship Final, Powergen Cup and topped the Zurich Premiership table.