Team Building

Deftly mixes theory, practical tools and personal experience into a provocative book about building business teams. Outlines the fundamentals that every empowering manage must understand before attempting the process of team building.

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding. To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the 4D teambuilding process - an approach that requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods and has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams.

This book states that people instinctively sense when a group experience is something special, something different from the ordinary, something that surpasses their expectations in a positive, remarkable, and hard-to-describe way. These are extraordinary groups that achieve outstanding results. Members of extraordinary teams—individually or collectively—experience a profound shift in how they see their world.

Teamwork, projects, collaborative problem solving, innovation, and creativity are central to success in engineering, especially in the increasingly global economy. The overall goal of Teamwork and Project Management, Fourth Edition is to prepare you for these aspects of professional practice in engineering. The approach involves engaging you in activity, reflection, and collaboration to build your knowledge and skills. The fourth edition represents a major redesign and includes an expanded number of collaborators. Specific goals for readers of Teamwork and Project Management, Fourth edition include: *To help frame the project team and identify and use an appropriate project management team. *To understand the dynamics of team development and interpersonal problem solving. *To identify strategies for accelerating the development of true team effectiveness. *To understand the critical dimensions of project scope, time, and cost management. *To understand the critical dimensions of project scope, time and cost management. *To explore a variety of best practices including anticipating, preventing, and overcoming barriers to project success.

Presents engineers with a communication microskills model, for both technical issues and social situations. Gives tips on how to engage, listen, manage conflict, and influence others with highly constructive, repeatable communication exchanges.

Historically, the need for communication skills was not particularly emphasized in engineering education. However, recent studies show that clear, spoken communication is an essential competency for an engineer. Introduces key principles of communication that support clear exchanges in a technical context. Using self-assessment tools and practical examples, as well as engineering-specific case studies, the book helps engineers develop effective communication and presentation skills, allowing them to successfully respond to technical challenges in day-to-day engineering jobs.

Most organizations see effective teamwork as essential to their success, but find that the reality of working in teams presents many practical difficulties. This text, based on rigorous research evidence, provides all the tools necessary to help teams overcome these difficulties, including case studies, discussion questions, exercises and questionnaires. Drawing on the latest psychological research, Effective Teamwork examines the factors which affect team functioning both positively and negatively.