Leading Self-Directed Work Teams : A Guide to Developing New Team Leadership Skills

Sharpen the leadership skills that make and keep companies competitive with this unique book, Leading Self-Directed Work Teams. Packed with eye-opening case studies of SDWTs at Kodak, Apple, Corning, Walmart, and other leading firms, Kim Fisher's thought-provoking book can help you increase cooperation and productivity in any dynamic environment.

You'll discover how to:

• manage by flexible principles-not rote policies;
• coax teams into meeting tough cost, quality, and productivity goals;
• set priorities that evolve as your team evolves;
• resolve team conflicts with innovatiove nonautocratic methods;
• encourage members to express their own views-even as you foster team values and vision;
• handle peers and senior managers who resist change

The Publisher
Across the country, highly competitive, self-directed work teams (SDWTs) are chalking up astonishing productivity gains. These work teams are replacing entrenched, autocratic, boss-driven organizations whose management styles are obsolete. Driving these remarkable workplace success stories is a new breed of supervisor who empowers teams through example and commitment, instead of by demanding obedience and control.

Drawing upon the actual experiences of hundreds of team leaders in such self-directed workplaces as Kodak, Apple, Corning, Shell, and many others, Leading Self-Directed Work Teams reveals how supervisors in any company - large or small - an take advantage of the career-boosting leadership skills that make and keep major corporations competitive. This timely book takes a refreshingly candid look at the challenges, intricacies, and rewards of changing from a traditional supervisor to a confident SDWT leader.

It focuses on hundreds of practical, time-tested techniques for developing the business, interpersonal, and technical capabilities of any team. And it explains step-by-step how you can master such crucial team leadership skills as coaching, business analysis, barrier busting, facilitating groups, customer advocacy, accessing information, and much more. Along the way, the author profiles the most innovative team leader practices learned from Kodak's 13 Room and Procter & Gamble experiments, demonstrating the remarkable benefits of managing by principle rather than by policy, and setting boundaries that change as the team matures.

Leading Self-Directed Work Teams guides you confidently through each of the five evolutionary phases most SDWTs experience during their maturation, detailing the specific skills and behaviors required to meet this sequence of challenges. For exceptional utility, it provides a weekly activity guide to help team leaders remember critical activities, supplies a special chapter focusing on "3 days in the life of a team leader," and shows how to quickly test and interpret your thoughts and behaviors about team leadership.

Whether you're a supervisor or CEO - whether your team is a small group of office workers or a Fortune 100 company - discover how to excite, energize, and inspire team members by

• developing the vision and guiding principles for effective team leadership;
• fostering coordination, clarity, and consistency without restricting autonomy and creativity;
• giving and obtaining feedback in a constructive, nondefensive manner;
• ending temper flare-ups, grievances, and eroding trust among team members;
• dealing with team members, peers, and senior managers resistant to the new work paradigm;
• deciding when appropriate management intervention is not only acceptable, but required; and
• making decisions in real time without traditional wasted periods.

In today's rapidly changing marketplace, the competitive edge belongs to those organizations that capitalize on the full potential of their human and technical resources. Leading Self-Directed Work Teams gives you the skills, insights, and confidence to adapt to today's indispensable leader-facilitator role and guide newly empowered, participative teams to their full potential.