A management consultant and his daughter offer ways to improve team performance.

“Mistakes and failures are springboards for opportunity and learning,” write the Smiths, a father-and-daughter team, at the outset of this conceptual outlook on team building in a corporate setting—a follow-up to Individual Advantages: Find the “I” in Team (2018). It’s only through rebuilding from failure—and the humility this engenders—that real leaders learn their craft. The authors cover creating and sustaining productive teams and seek to help managers of all kinds learn from common mistakes. Everyone has some type of influence, they assert, exerted in the “words, actions, decisions, thoughts, and reactions, or lack thereof,” that we exercise in the world. Understanding the nature and limitations of your own influence can help you assess how it interacts with potential team members’ influences. The authors recommend a series of guiding principles, including such basics as humility (“turning into an overbearing leader because of arrogance will derail the best of leaders and topple the best of organizations,” they warn—which seems odd; arrogance among leaders at all levels is quite common). Effective leaders stick close to their own values, a key strength when guiding others. “Setting your moral compass,” they write, “means upholding your personal values at all times—that is the true definition of leadership.” These and other maxims of team leadership unfold in a fast-paced series of sections with illustrations scattered throughout. The authors write with energy and clarity, often drawing on their own experiences, which are always delivered with blunt honesty—as when they illustrate the difficulty of overcoming intellectual laziness by confessing: “I have put my company at risk by being intellectually lazy, more than once.” This direct frankness prevails throughout the book and gives a very human cast to its advice.

The book’s prevailing disappointment is the authors’ heavy reliance on pat truisms. For example, burning bridges is a very personal decision, they tell us, that each person has to make for themselves. There’s much to be learned from other people if we take the time to listen, they note. The first step to owning a mistake is to take responsibility for it. When delegating there will always be a taskmaster and a task-maker. And so on. Why the authors feel the necessity to spend so much time on hackneyed old saws like these, things their readers certainly learned long ago, is a bit of a mystery, particularly since their narration makes it clear they’ve had enough professional experiences to provide far more nuanced insights. The material becomes more interesting when it moves to more psychological ground; the book is stronger when it’s dealing with, for instance, the range of emotions that accompanies periods of depression. Likewise the sections that stress how important it is for leaders to train themselves to be consistent; these contain powerful, straightforward advice about the practical applications of a cultivated positive outlook. It’s a shame that these more multifaceted approaches aren’t explored more fully.

A passionate, often disappointingly redundant outlook on creating stronger teams through candid communication.

An anecdotal guide delivers recipes for success in life and business.

Smith’s debut book focuses on self-realization, with the goal of creating for each reader an epiphany “about how your own individual advantages will affect the advantages of other individuals.” The author is the founder of Individual Advantages, “a company that helped other companies understand the correlation of people, process, and technology.” The bedrock of his approach is that every organization is made up of individuals, each one of whom brings unique strengths to the mix, whether they be physical, charismatic, personal, or a host of other things. These advantages have the ability to push people forward in life, but, as Smith points out, they can also pull individuals back if they’re not understood and handled well. The author has a long history as a professional consultant. He’s seen various staffs and managements in many different states of disarray and draws a series of lessons from all of them, here presented with clarity and fleshed out with ample tales from Smith’s own life and experiences. He talks about growing up poor, entering the military, and pursuing his gradually developed ambition to help people work better in teams, reminding his readers that “who you want to be is not about some physical job or position.” Throughout his book, the author puts forward some very simple concepts, like the virtues of slowing down and taking stock of things around you, honing individualism for personal strength, and determining what your real priorities are. Being self-aware, he asserts, is a basic key to forging your own individualism (and ultimately using it to enhance the individualism of others). When you can set aside your own ego and be honest about yourself, you construct a firmer foundation for becoming a leader. Smith uses clear, encouraging prose to elaborate on these basic underpinnings, and he overcomes the simplistic nature of his points by using a winningly self-deprecating tone. When talking about slowing down, for instance, Smith admonishes against immediate gratification, extols the virtues of living in the present, and uses himself both as a “before” and “after” example (“I was the stereotypical man who wouldn’t ask for directions,” he writes, before he changed his ways). The author’s truisms—sentiments like “If you really want to grow, then you need to face your own demons”—take on a greater degree of believability when he links them to his own story of self-improvement. He tells tales of the early days in his career when he let his emotions rule his reactions in tense business situations, usually to his detriment. These personal anecdotes make the resulting lessons (“There is no human on earth who has earned the right to treat another human being poorly,” for instance) feel far more meaningful.

A colorful and conversational manual that should help readers—personally and professionally—to better assess themselves and to build richer relationships with others.