Teamwork Is an Individual Skill : Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility

Getting Work Done in Teams promotes teamwork as an individual skill, not a group skill. Becoming skilled at doing more with others may be the single most important thing you can do to ensure that you remain employed in the emerging knowledge economy. This book equips readers with a set of individual mental skills and behaviours that can and will help you create highly responsible and productive relationships at work. No longer will you find yourself complaining, "I got assigned to a bad team." Instead, you'll know what to do to make teamwork work for you. In fact, this book aims to remove the ambiguity and magic thinking that exists around teambuilding. It does that by focusing on five abilities: (1) personal responsibility for productive relationships, (2) creating powerful partnerships, (3) aligning individuals around a shared purpose, (4) trusting just right, and (5) developing your collaborative mindset. Most importantly, this book shows you how you can build collaborations with one or more people, simply and powerfully, in any situation.

Christopher M. Avery, Ph.D. is president of Partnerwerks and developer of the acclaimed Being Powerful in Any Team seminar for technical professionals (www.beingpowerful.com). He has consulted with Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, Charles Schwab & Company, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, and Wells Fargo Bank, and many others.
Meri Aaron Walker is a principal of Between the Lines, an Austin, Texas-based strategic communications consultancy and a Partnerwerks associate.
Erin O’Toole Murphy, a Partnerwerks consultant, has trained Sony management in Japan and led other development initiatives..