Why Did I Write The “Winning Teams” Trilogy?

In the preface to all three of my books in the How To Build Winning Teams Again And Again trilogy, I wrote this:

Why I’ve Written This

In my view – and in my experience – we pay too little attention to helping people learn the art of team building and regeneration. Ask yourself, do companies spend much time and money on the subject? No. Do business schools offer deep dives into the challenge of building successful teams again and again? No. Yet much of a company’s success depends on its people’s ability to collaborate. The same is true of every country’s economy. Don’t you find this odd?

I do. And the older I get the stranger it seems. That’s why I’ve written this trilogy. I want to help individuals, their teams and their companies master the art of team building.

I won’t pretend; it hasn’t been a straightforward project. From beginning to end it’s taken seventeen years. If you’d told me in 2007, when I started, that this material won’t appear before 2024, I’d have felt discouraged. But therein lay my naivety. The truth is, it’s taken this long to disperse the fog and discern the few principles that really matter … and then test them in the marketplace with my coaching clients.

Gaining experience on what works and what doesn’t was crucial – crucial for my confidence and for making sure I don’t waste your time in reading this trilogy. My task was to simplify what I was learning so you can grasp it, but not oversimplify to the point where you miss important subtleties.

But, judging by questions from readers, I wasn’t explicit enough.

Yes, elsewhere in the trilogy I explained that organisations pay little attention to helping people (1) understand the difference between ordinary work groups and genuine teams and (2) learn how to build, sustain and regenerate teams.

But I didn’t explain why all the other models out there in the marketplace – many of them helpful – were apparently being ignored. Or if not entirely ignored, not being used to the point where people in business and not-for-profit organisations had become familiar with and skilled in the art of team building and its key principles.

So what was the gap I was trying to fill?

I wanted to offer a suite of models to help teams consciously address the hidden psychological barriers to team formation. In that way, I saw a pathway to enabling more genuinely high-functioning teams to emerge.

That led me to see a gap in existing models: the integration of psychological dynamics with practical team building (and turnaround) principles and roadmaps.

And that in turn led me to create a three-piece suite comprising the Team Progression Curve, the Commit-Combust-Combine psychological model and the Seven-Principle action model.

You might be asking where the Dual Forces model, described in Book 1, fits in?

Well, in fact it doesn’t fit into the integrated framework. I created it with only one purpose: to highlight the fact that there are hidden psychological forces making it harder for ordinary workgroups to become real teams and, therefore, that would-be teams needed to put conscious effort in to become genuinely high-performing. In other words, that you don’t become a team by happy accident.

I hope that helps readers understand my rationale for the entire trilogy project.