As Al Pacino said in the first Godfather movie, "...let me make you an offer you can’t refuse..." for within this book you will find team member skills and leadership skills distilled to their essence. Though there is a great deal that can be said on these two topics, the essential basics are no longer a mystery and are now out in the open for all to see and take advantage of.

I became captive of this material early in my nearly thirty-eight year career in IBM where I worked in marketing, software and hardware product development, brand management, and services. I was concerned with what I saw inside IBM where the best and the brightest consistently failed to live up to their potential – and worked long hours to do so.

I also became concerned by newspaper reports of conditions outside IBM that sounded familiar.

During a period of major growth in productivity, organizations struggling to get or remain profitable.

Middle managers finding themselves with too much to do, to many demands, and unable to do all that they know is important.

Lower level, non-management employees fearing there is no career path, no pension, no continuing health care, and no way out.

It sounded like increasingly like the business world was approaching a sweatshop mentality.

Polarization of superficially different views on almost every subject in our society.

I had a deep belief that all the resources were already present – human and other – to do much better than was evident on the evening TV news. There had to be a way for people to work better together and to be more effectively led.

I was most fortunate to be in a position to observe, experiment, brainstorm and discuss ideas with kindred souls, and eventually discover what was in front of us all the time like a purloined letter. My intuitive sense gave me the patience, interest and energy to discover the obvious – no one had crawled inside teams and asked what was needed from the viewpoint of the people involved.

Once I had sorted out the team processes I was delighted to read Built To Last – Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras who had done extensive research on what leadership produces visible outstanding corporate results. Their insights and observations helped me to complete my own work on leadership begun in my study of teams.

Last I put these two pieces together as they should have been from the start since they are quite interwoven in may ways. All that it took from there was to spend several years writing, receiving critical feedback and rewriting. It has been a struggle to get my thoughts down clearly. I hope I have done so and if not invite interaction, discussion and feedback to improve the clarity.

The value of this book is that it has packaged all this insight and learning into a very small bundle. Now the magic is available to everyone. So read on and good luck. Be patient with your understanding, apply what you understand right now and take time out regularly to assess what you have learned. Continual progress is not assured to those who are passive but it is guaranteed to those who follow the process laid out.

Ken Boggs retired from IBM Corporation after nearly thirty-eight years in a range of management and professional assignments. His career spanned the creation of ubiquitous large system computing, international information systems networks, the Internet, and the accreditation of project management.

Ken is a certified project manager and a qualified Myers-Briggs consultant. He has worked with small teams and some very large ones while managing projects up to $5M in value. Ken currently is a project management mentor and provides selective consulting and Myers-Briggs counseling.

Ken is married to Mary Lucas, physical therapist and yoga teacher, and lives in rural Chatham county North Carolina. When he is not working with teams, Ken is an avid putterer – building on his ten acres of pine and hard woods, gardening, operating an amateur radio station KB4RV, exercising and doing yoga, playing backgammon, singing folk songs and playing guitar, and enjoying his growing entourage of grandchildren.

This book debunks and challenges many commonly held views and popular myths about leadership and teams. So when swimming against the current viewpoint it seems appropriate to take a moment and establish who this book is directed towards, to define what is meant by a team and what teams are thus covered, to define what is meant by leadership and what leadership is covered, and to hear from a few who have already used this material to get a glimpse of that experience.

Who can make use of and benefit from the material covered in this book? Virtually everyone I think. For starters anyone who is either an employee or employer. Additionally folks who find themselves organizing groups of people, including children.

Most important the people who can make use of this material are, pardon my expression, ordinary. It does not take someone with a college degree or someone as trained as an Olympic athlete. All of us are candidates to benefit both as team members as well in our roles as leaders.

Some might think they only work by themselves and therefore never have the opportunity to work on a team. But unless you are a hermit hiding in the back woods, all of us interact with many people who provide us service. In these interactions we can choose to operate as cooperative peers who both have something to give and to gain, i.e. a small team. Too in these interactions we are the initiators who know what they want from the interaction, i.e. a leader.

It is commonplace to find ourselves operating in various teams. Work asks for us to "get on board and be a team member". At church we find ourselves on a ruling board. In our volunteer activities we are assigned to a committee. In many situations we are challenged be an effective individual but do that while interacting with others in this grouping called a team. But experience with these teams varies.

Some experience with teams has been unsatisfactory. Some people avoid teams and see them as time consuming, dragging down good people’s performance. One classic business negative stereotype is the business meeting that goes on at length and results in no obvious useful output. The Dilbert comic strip entertains many with these kinds of examples. It is obvious that creating useful and efficient teams is not all that easy. Many might seek the help of what has been already written.

Much work has been published on the subject of teams, team development, managing teams and team leadership. It would appear that this is a tired subject. Unfortunately everything so far has approached teams from outside the team, from a manager’s viewpoint and not that of the team member. The approach so far seems to make the assumption that someone outside the team can maximize the team and make the team do what it was assembled for. This viewpoint might be valid where the people managed are not the intellectual and emotional peers of the manager but that is generally not the case in the American society. Thus a different mindset needs to be taken.

Our approach here is to get inside the team and explore what a team member does that is most helpful and which contributes to optimal team performance. Clearly it is the team members’ behavior and how it interacts with other team members that constitutes the results of the team. Thus, we focus on the individual team member’s contribution exploring what is needed to optimize various behaviors and interactions with the expectation that results too will be maximized. However this too is not sufficient since teams do not operate in a vacuum.

Influences from outside the team are important and are separately investigated. This material can give managers and leaders guidance about how their behavior can maximize the results of the team.

The reason that all this material has been collected is that in combination -- a high performing team with a highly effective manager – the organizational results far exceed any other approach described heretofore. The combination also maximizes satisfaction of the team members and maximizes the results of the team while establishing realistic confidence so that the results are repeatable and sustainable. This is a pretty good deal. Even better this book shows how to objectively measure all of this and pinpoints where to place effort to improve.

Generalities are great but is my unique team covered here?

Most likely your team is covered since any group of people that works together to achieve common objectives is a team. A team is just a collection of team members. There is an enormous diversity among teams considering skills, types of interaction and the duration of the assemblage of the team. In some teams, the members have unique skills. In other teams, the members have largely similar and interchangeable skills. In some teams, the members interact in a highly structured and rigid fashion. In other teams, the members interact in an unpredictable and dynamic fashion. Teams may be assembled for short periods of time. Other teams may be together for years. It is possible to describe at least three general kinds of teams: Partnership, Competitive and Non-competitive.

There are many team models that benefit from optimizing team member behaviors. All of these models are covered in this book. For a moment consider these specific types to be our target:

Partnership Model
In a partnership, all members have equal power, authority and responsibility, e.g. a marriage, a child’s play group, a business partnership.

Competitive Model
In a competitive team, one group is pitted against another with some notion of winning and losing, e.g. sports like baseball, football and basketball, armies, American business and international governments.

Non-competitive Model
The non-competitive team usually provides a service, e.g. federal, state and local governments, the United Way, the Red Cross and international trade organizations like the World Trade Organization.

Why is the subject of leadership brought up in a text about getting the most out of teams? Don’t the highest performing teams outgrow management?

High performing teams do outgrow their need for traditional management but they never outgrow their need for leadership. Leadership provides a statement of direction and vision of what should be possible at the end of the current rainbow. Teams need this guidance. More to the point, teams thrive on such guidance.

Unfortunately organizational literature and business school curriculum cover a great deal on management but far less on leadership. And most of what is covered does so in isolation and not with regard the impact on the teams involved.

Clearly much more is needed. This text provides a practical answer that is measurable. Further with the ability to measure leadership comes the ability to identify types of leaders and develop specific-to-type recommendations for further growth and improvement.

It is the intent of this text to describe a fairly wide range of leadership skills and capabilities including those implied by David Chaudron, Ph.D. who tells the following story.

"The chiefs of three villages each set out to build a bridge across a wide chasm. If they could build this bridge, the trade that came would enrich the lives of villagers for generations to come.