INDIVIDUAL ADVANTAGES

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.