Never before in the history of the workplace has the concept of teamwork been more important to the functioning of successful organizations. Ken Blanchard, bestselling coauthor of Raving Fans, The One Minute Manager, and Gung Ho! teams up with Donald Carew and Eunice Parisi-Carew to explain how all groups move through four stages of development on their way to becoming high performing teams -- orientation, dissatisfaction, integration, and production. The authors then show how a manager can help any group to become fully effective quickly and with hardly any stress.

This valuable addition to The One Minute Manager Library is essential for anyone who works with groups and wants to build a high performing team.

Academically, the two principal concepts that Blanchard and his co-authors use, are the stages of group development and Situational Leadership. The familiar stages of forming, storming, norming and performing are termed orientation, dissatisfaction, integration and production. Situational Leadership in this context refers to changing leadership styles according to the stage of the group, thereby filling in for process tasks that the group is unable to accomplish for itself.

Groups tend to start in a high-energy, high motivation but low skills and understanding mode of operation. In this stage, directive leadership provides the structure necessary to move forward. The second stage is one of dissatisfaction, questioning of leadership and clarification of roles. As unpleasant as this stage is, we are reminded that conflicts cannot be resolved if they are avoided. A resolving attitude on the part of the leader is exactly what is needed. As confidence and morale return to the group members, they pass hesitatingly into a third stage, termed integration. In this stage, commitment on goals, roles and tasks increases, as well as to the norms, values and processes of the group. A collaborating leadership style that allows control to be shared and facilitates the surfacing of disagreements is critical to the group's continued growth. Finally, the production stage is characterized by high levels of trust, morale, energy and empowerment. The team can pretty much function autonomously, without a leader whose primary purpose is to validate.

Blanchard's strength is his manner of presentation and clarity of relating ideas from disparate sources. The book is a quick read and yet it presents some fairly profound concepts, connecting the dots in a way that reading a collection of "Harvard Business Review" articles can never accomplish. Most of the book is a conversation between Dan Brockway, the director of training at a chemical company, and his mentor, The One Minute Manger. The coordinator of customer service programs, Maria Sanchez, disagrees with the presentation of material for The Essentials of Management course that Dan is coordinating.

Instead of helping Dan convince her that she is wrong, The One Minute Manger allows Dan to observe the functioning of four groups at different stages of development at his own company. The gradual, real-world exposition of the central issues of group dynamics leads into three-way discussions between Dan, Maria and the Manager about the practicalities, pitfalls and variations in group development. The goal is to produce what Blanchard and others have called "Highly-Effective Teams", effectively defined in the early pages.

The intent of the book is to teach and, with two educational doctorates as co-authors, the structure and style is simple to read and flows so logically that it is as easy to digest as Jello. A busy manager can read this book in a single New York commute and keep revisiting it as needed, while his teams evolve. Students can learn and integrate new concepts more fruitfully, as they learn how the pieces all fit together. Participants in teams can quickly get a sense of what they need to do to effectively contribute to the tasks at had, which inevitably include the processes that the group uses to get things done. Anyone reading this book is well advised to realize that this is a brief synopsis and oversimplification of group dynamics and leadership styles. Extended discussions of roles played by participants in dysfunctional groups and extensive elaboration of Situational leadership are found elsewhere and should be referenced when necessary. In the end, drawing on all our creativity and individual knowledge and experience is the path to generating value in a knowledge economy.