Optimizing Your Performance on a Team: A Practical Guide

A truly effective team is equal to more than the sum of its parts. And it takes the dedication of every member of the team. Effective team members go beyond themselves and their personal desires and goals. If you want to be an effective team member, your challenge is to put the team first, which means maximizing your contributions to help the team accomplish its purpose.
This book covers strategies and techniques to help you become an effective and valued member of your team. Specifically, you'll explore ways for adopting a positive approach to being on a team, like recognizing the benefits of working on a team and learning to tolerate team member differences. You'll also learn how to work proactively and collaboratively with members of your team as you achieve your team's goals.
Regardless of how talented the individual members of your team are, they can only get your team so far alone. To maximize their potential, teams rely on the participation, input, and opinions of all team members. Learning to speak up and encouraging others to open up are important to a team's success. Effective communication is the fuel that will keep your team going to the finish line.
In this book, you'll learn the importance of fostering a team environment that encourages open and supportive communication. You will learn to recognize common verbal barriers that can seriously interfere with team productivity and learn strategies for eliminating those barriers. This course also covers active listening and presents techniques for listening more effectively to teammates, thereby encouraging the sharing of ideas within the team.
Three elements are always present in any effective, cohesive team: open communication, cooperation, and trust. Like the strands of a cord, these elements hold the team together and give it strength. Without these elements, team members will not participate fully in team activities and they won't find true satisfaction in their work. When trust and open communication is present, ideas flow and people find solutions to problems. When there's cooperation, team members feel connected to each other, and morale is high.
This book introduces techniques for building a cohesive team and highlights how poor communication, a trust-deficient atmosphere, and a lack of cooperation among team members leads to failure of the team achieving its goals. This course covers what needs to happen in order to reach true unity and cohesiveness, which will in turn take the team to new heights.
All individuals have strengths that allow them to achieve goals consistently and successfully. In a team setting, those individual strengths can combine to lead the whole team to success, or they can create conflict and tension. To harness individual strengths and personalities, you need solid ground rules for the team. You also need to allocate roles and responsibilities for maximum efficiency.
This book outlines initial steps that should be performed when building a team, including establishing the team goal and assigning roles to individual team members in a way that ensures the team will collectively meet its goal. The course also discusses the importance of fully understanding one's responsibilities and how the various roles work together to achieve the goal.
A crucial component of optimal team performance is the ability of all team members to openly express their ideas, goals, and needs, as well as share thoughts about each other's performance – both positive and negative. The same principle applies when it comes to receiving feedback. It's far better to hear the truth directly than to assume your performance is the best it can be.
In this book, you'll learn how to deliver feedback to other members of your team using a direct, honest, and assertive style that strives to eliminate uncertainty. You'll also learn techniques to help you receive and process feedback provided by other team members.