Name: The Power of a Positive Team
Rating: 4.4 (103 reviews)
Author: Jon Gordon

What’s in it for me? Learn some priceless tips on how to build and lead the perfect team.

Great teams are far more than a collection of talented people. You can bring together some of the brightest minds and still have a highly dysfunctional team. As you’ll find out in the blinks ahead, what makes a truly effective team is a mixture of different qualities, chief among them the commitment to making or achieving something that can’t be done alone.

We know that great things can happen when people come together and put their minds to it. In a way, modern civilization is a testament to what human cooperation is capable of. Author Jon Gordon performs a valuable service by telling us what every team leader should know, from what qualities a perfect team should have to which pitfalls can bring down even the best teams.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why culture is Apple’s secret ingredient;
how a vampire motivated a football team; and
why it pays to study details few people will ever see.

Creating a positive team benefits both the team and the person who leads it.

The business world is filled with challenges, starting with trying to get new ideas, organizations and products off the ground. Of course, having a great team at your service can be a huge asset, and yet keeping that team running smoothly presents its own challenges.

For starters, it’s important to keep your team motivated when times are tough or when your goal looks more like a fantasy than a real possibility. This is just one example of when staying positive is crucial to staying afloat.

One of the big benefits of establishing an optimistic, positive outlook within your team is that everyone benefits, with the group as a whole, as well as each individual, experiencing an increased likelihood of success.

According to a report from Duke University, optimistic individuals have a greater likelihood of succeeding in politics, business and sports.

The benefits of positive thinking extend beyond the workplace as well: the pioneering psychologist John Gottman found that married couples who engaged in five positive interactions for every one negative interaction were much likelier to stay together than the couples who were closer to a one-to-one ratio.

And what about team leaders? Well, they also benefit from the positive workplace environment they help create – and it starts with having devoted team members.

According to the research of organizational expert Wayne Baker, leaders who exude positive energy naturally attract other people. So, if you’re a leader with a vision and you project an aura of optimism and unity, people in your workplace will naturally want to be around you.

As Baker explains, positive-thinking leaders will inevitably attract talented colleagues, rather than other leaders, and these people will likely devote their time willingly to your projects. It’s also likely that they’ll share new information, opportunities and ideas with you before they share them with anyone else.

To put it simply: when the team is thinking positively, everyone wins.

Positive teams confront negativity and actively eliminate it from their ranks.

In their attempts to establish a positive team culture, many organizations make a simple but critical mistake: they reward positivity and yet ignore the hints of negativity lurking just below the surface. This may sound relatively harmless, but unaddressed negativity is guaranteed to fester and grow until it eventually infects the whole team.

Fortunately, there are reliable cures that can disinfect any team of its lurking negativity.

Poor communication can breed negativity, so teams must maintain regular face-to-face meetings.

These days, we have a vast number of ways to communicate: through email, texting and a variety of messaging apps and social media platforms. But the irony is, one of the most common reasons for a dysfunctional team is poor communication.

It begs the question: Why are so many teams feeling disconnected when there are so many tools for reaching out to one another? The answer is, with so many different ways of communicating, our messages have become less meaningful. This can lead to disastrous results.

Care and commitment are the keys to astounding collective and individual achievement.

It takes more than one superstar to create a winning team. Extraordinary teams require the collaboration of extraordinary members who are committed to achieving greatness.

You may think Oscar-winning actors do it all by themselves, but in reality, each one has a whole crew of dedicated individuals who made their performance possible, from the writer, director and cinematographer to the set designer. Just because we don’t see them on the movie screen doesn’t mean they’re not an invaluable part of the process. For greatness to happen, it takes the care and commitment of every individual working together.

Positive teams make small, determined steps toward greatness for the sake of fellow team members.

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough be part of a powerful, positive team, you’ll know that it’s not just fun and games. With a commitment to achieving greatness, there also comes a striving – a desire to improve yourself for the betterment of the team.

This means that an exceptional team isn’t just a collection of individuals committed to one another, they’re also committed to self-improvement as part of the overall pursuit of excellence.

Kernaussagen in The Power of a Positive Team