Business Book Summaries

In today’s pop business culture of motivational phrases and self-improvement books on successful management, there is no shortage of slogans about the value of teamwork: “There’s no ‘I’ in teamwork.” “TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More.” “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

The fact is, they all convey what we know instinctively: Teams are powerful. Through our own experience and supporting research, we are convinced that complex problems benefit greatly from the creativity that comes from diverse thought, backgrounds, and styles. But I have yet to see a slogan that reveals the underlying secret of the very highest performing teams.

A major consulting firm figured it out. The researchers studied “successful” teams and the truly “breakthrough” teams to try to determine the differentiators between the two. They looked at the size of the team, the combination of management levels, the gender and culture mix, among many other variables.

In the end, they concluded that the greatest determinant of a breakthrough team is that they members of the team care as much about each other’ success as they do about their own success.

It’s well worth the investment to institutionalize a method for hiring people that’s based not only on the capacity to do the job but also on the capacity to care. That is, if you care about more than just getting the job done.

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