Peter Moxon’s very readable book looks at the experience many managers and teams are having at the moment, as organizations change shape, initiatives pile up and people are flung together to sort it all out. He shares years of hard‐won experience and his own conclusions about what works and what doesn’t to help teams deliver, and I found myself nodding in recognition as I read, as well as making notes about ideas to try out.
Building a Better Team is as useful for people who are planning high‐level change and need to understand the human factor as it is for those who they will be asking to make it happen. Peter Moxon’s descriptions of team behaviour and ways of predicting and handling potentially problematic situations will give practical insights to managers with little experience of working at this level as well as to experienced facilitators.
He usefully analyses what can make teams (and, on a bigger scale, whole organizations) functional and able to deliver ‐ or dysfunctional and likely to fail ‐ and suggests critical questions and corrective actions to help. Crucially, he explains how to avoid the pitfalls of blaming team failure on personality clashes or other simplistic causes, and takes the reader through ways of getting at and dealing with typical root causes for failure and building successful foundations for teams.
The book asks and answers the perennial questions like the following. What is a team? Why is it useful? How do you build (and sustain a good one) and know it’s delivering? How do you anticipate and avoid, or recognize and solve, problems that make teams fail? How do you make the experience for individuals a successful and rewarding one, whether they are team leader or team member? Throughout, Peter Moxon sets out simple but effective tools and examples which can be put into practice easily. Highly recommended.
