University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
High-Impact Tools for Teams
Book

High-Impact Tools for Teams

A powerful toolkit to create alignment, build trust and get results fast. Rediscover the joy of teamwork... (The Strategyzer Series)

Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Alex Osterwalder, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos
Wiley, 2021
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • Eye Opening
  • Eloquent

Recommendation

When work teams can’t meet reasonable performance expectations, the problem often turns out to be that the members can't work together in honest, trusting collaboration. As authors Stefano Mastrogiacomo and Alex Osterwalder and designers Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos explain, teams are productive when their members feel psychologically safe and work cooperatively toward a common goal. To facilitate productivity, make sure your work-related activities align, so everyone knows who does what. This practical guide full of often amusing sketches and charts will help anyone who runs a firm, leads a project or works in a team.

Summary

Teams can’t perform well when their objectives are misaligned or their working atmosphere is emotionally unsafe.

Working in teams can be productive and happy or stressful and fatiguing. When work isn’t going well, team members spend half their time in meetings talking at cross-purposes. They have trouble juggling budgets and priorities. The stress and alienation make people unproductive and unhappy.

Teams perform poorly when their work tasks aren’t aligned, and they lack clearly articulated, shared goals. Symptoms of team misalignment include ambiguous division of assignments, shifting priorities and team members who work in unnecessary isolation.

Teams become unproductive when the atmosphere is emotionally or psychologically toxic. Such an atmosphere features a lack of trust, excessive competition and alienated employees. When people don’t enjoy working with their teammates, they underperform.

Productive team alignment has four principal features.

To achieve appropriate alignment, teams need a “Team Alignment Map” which accomplishes these four principal objectives.

  1. It clearly articulates the team...

About the Authors

Lead author and management consultant Stefano Mastrogiacomo, a faculty member at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, designed the Team Alignment Map, the Team Contract and the Fact Finder. Thinkers50 Strategy Award winner Alex Osterwalder also wrote – among other titles – Value Proposition Design and The Invincible Company, both co-authored by Yves Pigneur. Osterwalder invented the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas and the Business Portfolio Map. Creative lead Alan Smith, a designer and entrepreneur, co-founded Strategyzer, where designer Trish Papadakos collaborates.

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