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

by Linda Adams, Abby Curnow-Chavez, Audrey Epstein, Rebecca Teasdale, Jody Berger (With)

Overview

Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, though they can make it look deceptively easy. Too many teams engage in dysfunctional behaviors or fall into territorialism, apathy, and unproductive relationships. The result? An overwhelmed, unengaged, and stressed-out workforce that settles for average or poor performance.

Here, four authors with a combined century of management experience show readers how every team can be extraordinary. The authors introduce their field-tested Loyalist Team 3D assessment that allows anyone to get to the heart of why teams break down, identify the weaknesses in their own team, and build a Loyalist Team. This kind of team has members who ensure each other's success as they work to ensure their own, operate with absolute candor, and value loyalty and authenticity to deliver results, create a healthy work environment, and help companies succeed. The Loyalist Team is a must-read for anyone who wants their team to achieve extraordinary results.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610397551
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

05/15/2017
A quartet of authors, principals in the Trispective Group consulting firm, lay out an optimistic but insufficiently specific blueprint to improving corporate cultures. The four have worked with thousands of clients across many industries, and in their experience, some form of dysfunction usually holds companies back from peak performance. This slim team-building guide calls on bosses to create an atmosphere of trust, honesty, and fair-minded behavior. The authors break down the different kinds of companies into four categories; these, from least to most successful, are as follows: saboteurs, benign saboteurs, situational loyalists, and loyalists. In this schema, loyalist companies comprise smart, accomplished people who trust, challenge, and push one another. Since the authors—unsurprisingly—favor the last model, they built their consulting firm on it. They walk readers through diagnosing which kind of team you have and solving team-specific issues; case studies for each kind of team appear throughout. The friendly tone and the narrative format are appealing and readers facing specific problems addressed here are likely to find this book encouraging, but the model excludes far too many dysfunctions to be truly useful. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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

"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

"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.

"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

From the Publisher

Using vivid stories of functional and dysfunctional teams they’ve worked with, four consultants describe the values and practices that characterize high-performing work groups. Elisabeth Rodgers’s performance captures the authors’ confidence and delivers their advice with fsensitivity to the arc of each story and the principles behind their recommendations. She speaks to listeners with a wonderful blend of strength and charming accessibility. The team dysfunctions and the interventions the authors offer remind us that we shouldn’t be satisfied with work groups that make us feel insecure, distrusting, or uncertain of our team’s purpose. Calling the best teams “loyalist” captures the central idea—that teams work best when everyone is authentically committed to the group’s mission and each other, rather than competing, defending turf, or avoiding difficult discussions. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Using vivid stories of functional and dysfunctional teams they’ve worked with, four consultants describe the values and practices that characterize high-performing work groups. Elisabeth Rodgers’s performance captures the authors’ confidence and delivers their advice with fsensitivity to the arc of each story and the principles behind their recommendations. She speaks to listeners with a wonderful blend of strength and charming accessibility. The team dysfunctions and the interventions the authors offer remind us that we shouldn’t be satisfied with work groups that make us feel insecure, distrusting, or uncertain of our team’s purpose. Calling the best teams “loyalist” captures the central idea—that teams work best when everyone is authentically committed to the group’s mission and each other, rather than competing, defending turf, or avoiding difficult discussions. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile