The Loyalist Team: How Trust, Candor, and Authenticity Create Great Organizations

Description

Great teams make it look easy. They create brilliant products, deliver excellent service, and achieve extraordinary results. From the outside, it's easy to imagine that these stellar teams must be made up of extraordinary individuals, or mortals blended together by great chemistry. But neither is true. Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, and can mean the difference between success and failure in any company. To write this groundbreaking book, four extraordinary women with a combined century of experience at the highest levels of corporate America have studied thousands of teams. They call the highest-achieving dream teams Loyalist Teams, because on those teams, individuals are loyal to one another, the team, and the larger organization. Members work to ensure each other's success as they work to ensure their own. They operate with absolute candor and refuse to let each other fail. As a result of these behaviors, they enjoy their work and always exceed performance expectations for their companies. The most effective teams share specific characteristics and traits that are identifiable and replicable, and include loyalty, honesty, and trust. In THE LOYALIST TEAM, the authors explain the ways teams break down and provide clear examples of the the most toxic, dysfunctional teams that hamper progress. Readers will undoubtedly see their own experiences in revealing profiles of low-performing teams such as Saboteur Teams, Benign Saboteur Teams, and Situational Loyalist Teams. But wherever their current team falls on the spectrum, readers will find an accessible way to understand their own team dynamic, diagnose problems, and take the necessary steps to become the best kind of team--a Loyalist Team--that consistently delivers extraordinary value.

Linda Adams, Abby Curnow-Chavez, Audrey Epstein, and Rebecca Teasdale (with a century of combined experience) honed their expertise inside some of the largest and most powerful businesses operating today. The four authors have led the human resources, talent management, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness functions of multiple Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Company, Pepsi, and Target. Currently, the four comprise the TriSpective Group, catering to companies like PetSmart, Kaiser, Orbitz, and others.

The Loyalist Team brings to life the essence of team identity and culture, and how analytics and evaluative tools can drive self-awareness and future team success. An excellent guide for CEO's, talent management executives, and anyone looking to understand and improve team performance.--Barbara Krumsiek, senior industry fellow at GeorgetownUniversity Women's Leadership Institute, McDonough School of Business, andformer CEO of Calvert Investments The Loyalist Team, provides a pragmatic approach to understanding how your team works and how you can help it work better. The authors draw from their vast expertise with thousands of teams to tell engaging, real-life stories about how teams of all types and sizes function and provide proven insights about how to achieve extraordinary results.--JudithE. Glaser, bestselling author of Conversational Intelligence and CEO ofBenchmark Communications, Inc. An honest, straightforward analysis of how to identify and celebrate not only what makes companies successful, it also tells us how and why we can experience failure. After reading this book, you'll know exactly how to build a winning team, a happy team, and above all how to create genuine and lasting loyalty.--Nina Tassler, advisor, former chairman of CBSEntertainment, and author of What I Told My Daughter Right now, this team, my team is the best team I have ever led. We're not perfect but we are working really hard with the support of Trispective to become a Loyalist Team. I know that we are making progress because of the reactions I see when we are under stress. In recent months, as a business, we've faced some really tough challenges. As we address those challenges it will create significant opportunities for us. We're charting new territory for this team. The stakes are high and we have to move quickly. The team has come to me and said, 'We've got your back. Let's move forward. We can do this.' It feels great and we are being successful.--Enrique Escalante, CEO Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua This is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how to actually build a great team. It is centered on the foundation that great teams are about great relationships that are built on trust and candid feedback. The authors showcase their insight by walking through the good and the bad from the thousands of teams they have worked with, sharing concrete, practical steps any leader can use to improve the culture in their workplace. The Loyalist Team introduces a new paradigm for leadership that is required to compete in today's business world.--Rob Katz, CEO, Vail Resorts, Inc. With the Loyalist Team Model, I am really clear what is required of me as a leader and as importantly what is required of the team to build a really successful loyalist organization. I know I can never take the human dynamics on a team for granted.--Mike Goodwin, SVP and Chief Information Officer, PetSmart