What’s New

We’re very pleased that Why Teams Don’t Work has been through numerous printings and is now embarking on a second edition.

What’s new in this edition? Lots. We’ve added 65 new pages, and torn out 28 old ones.

We focus everything through the lens of team intelligence—the smarts a team has to acquire together in order to perform. Team intelligence is a kind of play on words. On the one hand, it means good ideas about teams—the intent of this book. But it also refers to the intelligence successful teams must have, the knowledge their members have about one another, that is the key to high performance.

On balance, we can report that this edition is more practical for everyday use, while having a more radical flavor. We’re madder than ever at bad bosses and toxic team members, so we load this edition up with hints on how to avoid the one and hang a bell on the other.

We add a section on team leadership—what special qualities and skill sets a leader has to cultivate in order to lead. Team leadership, it turns out, requires more than mere project management skills.

We talk more about the impact of personality on teams. Not just why Dave and Edna can’t get along, but what Dave can do to work better with Edna, what kind of leader Dave would make, and how to get Edna to check her e-mail more than once a month.

We provide some nifty new concepts for addressing team problems. Like boundary management, to create clarity for so-called empowered teams. (“You are empowered to do whatever it takes xi to solve customer problems, provided it doesn’t cost more than $100.”) Or the “team of one” (end quarreling, miscommunication, and delays by eliminating everyone from the team but one).xii

We tie technology to team dysfunction. The Internet is creating new ways for teams to communicate. Some of this is great, but it poses problems for team members who aren’t up to snuff technologically.

We update our history of teams. With the perspective of years, we can see now that teams were not just copied from Japan, or created as a consequence of downsizing. They represent a healthy new stage in the evolution of organizations, in which people’s talents are finally more important than the hours they clock.

We unearth several myths about teams that really should have been in the first edition. Like, the notion that sports teams and your team have anything whatsoever in common.

But the biggest change is our definition of teams. The first edition looked solely at corporate teams, especially self-directed work teams. This edition takes a broader perspective, seeing teams and team problems everywhere—not just in large corporations, but in small firms, nonprofits, civic groups, schools. Teams aren’t just “in” organizations anymore. Just as often, they straddle organizations, bringing representatives of different groups together to solve problems.

A team is just people doing something together. A team can be together for 20 years. Or a phone call lasting 20 seconds may bracket the creation of a team, the completion of a task, and the subsequent dissolution of the team.

That’s the vision. Now here’s the book.