Collaboration is critical for organizations in the twenty-first century, but few business people have been trained to teach it. How do you collaborate to advance ideas and then communicate them throughout your organization? Gretchen Anderson's practical book shows you how to generate ideas with others while gaining buy-in from all levels of your organization. Mastering Collaboration by Gretchen Anderson is regarded as one of the best books on teamwork you should read.

Product managers, designers, marketers, technical leaders, and executives will gain a better understanding of how team members make decisions together. You'll learn how to turn promising ideas into marketable products, services, and solutions through hands-on exercises and techniques.

• Develop ideas into hypotheses that can be tested and refined using a framework.
• Avoid common pitfalls when collaborating.
• Align communication strategies to ensure effective and inclusive collaboration.
• Organize events or meetings for various types of collaboration based on the people involved.
• To foster inclusion, practice giving and receiving critiques without relying on consensus-based decisions.

Author: Gretchen Anderson

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Collaboration-Working-Together-Productive/dp/1492041734/

Iterate is a guide to the iterative organization, which is the only type of organization capable of learning and adapting quickly enough to keep up in today's world. It describes the fundamental behaviors that create iteration, explains how to implement them, and includes videos and an online assessment to get the process started for anyone leading a team of managers or advising someone who does. Iterate defines management and assists readers in creating a fast, flexible, focused management team that does it well.

Ed Muzio, award-winning author, CEO, and "one of the planet's clearest thinkers on management practice," provides a research-based blueprint for a management team that will always take the next best step for the organization. This book enables senior leadership, front-line and middle management, and human resource executives to provide their teams with both knowledge and practical skills, allowing them to not only understand but also perform their own purpose in the face of ever-changing conditions. Iterate will assist readers in producing measurable business results on any size management team in any industry where complex work and frequent change are the norms.

Author: Ed Muzio

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Iterate-Fast-Flexible-Focused-Management/dp/0999191314/

Ross McCammon made an incredible and unexpected transition ten years ago from working at an in-flight magazine in suburban Dallas to landing his dream job at Esquire in New York. What followed was a period of almost crippling anxiety and awkwardness, interspersed with minor moments of professional glory, as McCammon learned how to navigate the workplace while feeling completely unprepared for success in his new career.

Works Well with Others chronicles McCammon's "relentlessly funny and soberingly insightful"* journey from impostor to authority, revealing the workplace for what it is: an often absurd landscape of ego and fear guided by social rules that no one ever discusses. McCammon draws on his own experiences at the magazine to offer advice on everything from firm handshakes to elevator small talk to dealing with jerks and underminers. Here's an inspiring new way of looking at your job, your career, and success itself; an approachable guide for those of you who are smart, talented, and ambitious but aren't well-"leveraged" and don't feel prepared for success... or know what to do once we've achieved it.

Author: Ross McCammon

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Works-Well-Others-Shutting-Business/dp/1101984139/

Patrick Lencioni's classic book, The Ideal Team Player, outlined a groundbreaking approach for dealing with the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here, he shifts his focus to the individual, revealing the three essential qualities of a great team player. It is considered one of the best books on teamwork.

Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle's company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork, in The Ideal Team Player. Jeff must decipher the virtues that true team players possess and then create a hiring and development culture based on those virtues.

Beyond the parable, Lencioni provides a practical framework and tools for identifying, hiring and developing ideal team players. Whether you're a leader looking to build a team culture, a staffing professional looking to hire true team players, or a team player looking to improve yourself, The Ideal Team Player will be as useful as it is compelling.

Author: Patrick M. Lencioni

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Ideal-Team-Player-Recognize-Cultivate/dp/1119209595/

The Second City executives- Tom Yorton and Kelly Leonard reveal improvisational techniques that can help any organization develop innovators, encourage adaptable leaders, and build transformational businesses. For more than fifty years, Chicago's Second City comedy theater has served as a training ground for some of the industry's best comic minds, including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. However, it also offers one-of-a-kind leadership training to forward-thinking businesses, nonprofits, and public sector organizations, with the goal of increasing creativity, collaboration, and teamwork.

Leadership and teamwork rules have changed, and the skills that propelled professionals ahead a generation ago no longer apply. The Second City now offers a new toolkit for individuals and organizations to thrive in a world shaped by speed, social communication, and decentralization. Yes, And, which is based on eight improvisation principles, helps to develop and foster these skills in high-potential leaders and their teams, including:

• Developing the ability to collaborate in an ensemble
• Promoting a "yes, and" attitude at work
• Accepting failure as a means of accelerating high performance
• Listening and learning to follow are two ways to lead.
• Making something out of nothing is an example of innovation.

Yes, And is a must-read for professionals and organizations, assisting in the development of invaluable leadership skills required for today's success. It is regarded as one of the best books on teamwork.

Author: Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Yes-Improvisation-Reverses-Creativity-Collaboration-Lessons/dp/0062248545/

High performance has always necessitated astute strategy and flawless execution. These elements remain critical, especially in today's unprecedented business environment. However, Rich Karlgaard, Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director, takes an unexpected turn and argues that a third element is now required for competitive advantage. It promotes innovation, accelerates strategy and execution, and cannot be replicated or purchased. It can be found in an unexpected place: your company's values.

Karlgaard studied a number of long-lasting companies and discovered that they all have one thing in common: they have all leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth while also weathering hard times. In The Soft Edge, Karlgaard tells these stories while identifying the five key variables that comprise every organization's "soft edge":

• Trust: Northwestern Mutual has built a $25 million revenue behemoth on trust, the foundation of long-term success. Learn how to foster a trusting environment that fosters high performance.
• Smarts: Your formal education quickly becomes out of date in most technical fields. How do you manage to keep up? Learn how the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University's women's basketball team, and others stay on top by relentlessly pursuing competitive advantage through intelligence.
• Teamwork: Because collaboration and innovation are essential in today's global economy, effective teamwork is essential. Discover how global conglomerate FedEx maintains focus and how nimble Nest Labs relies on lean teams with cognitive diversity.
• Taste: As a proxy for intelligence, clever product design and integration make customers feel smart. Taste, on the other hand, goes deeper into a profound emotional engagement. According to Specialized Bicycles, it is "the elusive spot between data truth and human truth." How can you create products or services that consistently elicit these emotional touchpoints?
• Story: Companies that achieve long-term success have a compelling and emotionally appealing story to tell. What is your company's origin story? How do you tell your story? Learn how to tell a compelling story in a world where outsiders frequently speak louder.

Author: Rich Karlgaard

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1118829425/

Have you ever wondered why your divisions are divided the way they are? Have you ever used the word silo to describe sub-optimal results? Have you ever wished for an organization that combines the efficiency of competition with the effectiveness of collaboration? Disciplined collaboration is for you if you're tired of drawing dotted lines on charts and hugging trees or colleagues on your day off. Emmanuel Gobillot, global speaker, consultant, and leadership expert, identifies the real barriers to collaboration and proposes a disciplined approach to removing them in this engaging, thoughtful, and well-researched book.

In Disciplined Collaboration, he identifies four fears that will never be addressed by dotted lines or team-building exercises. Disciplined Collaboration teaches you how to make your divisions add up again by combining the most recent psychological and organizational research with pragmatic real-world application. This book will assist you in diagnosing the issues that impede collaboration in your organization. Learn how to master the shift in influence from competition to collaboration.

• Learn how to implement the four disciplines that will help your team overcome its fear of collaboration.
• Discover practical tools to assist you in reconnecting with individuals and teams.
• Be inspired by stories from a diverse range of fields, including business, history, and medicine, as well as tailoring and comedy!

Emmanuel Gobillot, dubbed "the first leadership guru for the digital generation" and "the freshest voice in leadership today," has over 15 years of experience assisting organizations and audiences worldwide in rethinking the way they build and run organizations. He has used his mantra of "there must be a better way, and together we can find it" to solve problems alongside leaders of some of the world's largest organizations as well as the smallest startups. Emmanuel was a Director at HayGroup before starting his own boutique consultancy, where he led both the consumer sector and the leadership services practices.

Author: Emmanuel Gobillot

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09F18X87W/

In today's hypercompetitive economy, workplaces are tense and overburdened, forcing managers to choose between results and relationships. Because executives set aggressive goals, managers push their teams to deliver, which leads to burnout. Or, because employees seek connection and support, managers prioritize relationships... and fail to meet financial targets. Stress, frustration, and disengagement result–for both team members and managers. Managers, on the other hand, must achieve both in order to succeed. They must motivate their employees to achieve while also creating an environment in which they truly want to. Winning Well provides managers with a quick, actionable plan that includes examples, stories, and online assessments. It is one of the best books on teamwork.

Managers will learn how to do the following:

• Get rid of the corrosive win-at-all-costs mindset.
• Concentrate on the game rather than the score.
• Reinforce results-producing behaviors.
• Maintain momentum and energy
• Be the type of leader that people want to work for.

To prevent burnout and disengagement while still achieving the necessary success for the company, managers must learn how to get their employees productive while creating an environment that motivates them to produce even more. Winning Well provides a quick, actionable plan for making the workplace more productive, rewarding, and even enjoyable.

Author: Karin Hurt and Winning Well

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0814437257/

Antipatterns: Managing Software Organizations and People, Second Edition catalogs 49 business practices that are frequently precursors to failure, with an emphasis on leadership principles and practices. This updated edition of a best-selling book not only illustrates bad management practices, but also discusses the bad work environments and cultural traits that are common in IT, software development, and other business domains. It describes the situation and symptoms, provides examples, and offers a refactoring solution for each antipattern.

The authors, who are graduate faculty at Penn State University, avoid an overly scholarly tone in favor of entertaining sidebars, cartoons, stories, and jokes. They give names to the antipatterns that are visually appealing, humorous, and memorable. They illustrate key concepts in an engaging way by using real-world anecdotes. This revised edition includes a new chapter, six updated chapters, and new discussion questions, as well as new management and environmental antipatterns. Leadership principles, environmental antipatterns, group patterns, management antipatterns, and team leadership are among the topics covered.

Following an introduction to management theory and human behavior, the text catalogs a comprehensive list of management, cultural, and environmental antipatterns. It includes thought-provoking exercises in which you describe a situation, identifies antipatterns, and explain how to refactor it. It offers tried-and-true advice to help you overcome bad habits by interacting successfully with your clients, customers, peers, supervisors, and subordinates.

Author: Colin J. Neill, Philip A. Laplante and Joanna F. DeFranco

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Antipatterns-Managing-Software-Organizations-Engineering/dp/1439861862/

Today's CEOs are as well-known to everyone as the most popular entertainers or sports stars, but those leaders below the CEO are the heart and soul of every organization. Today's celebrity CEO has either become a figurehead or an egomaniac, and is frequently too public a figure to get the real work done. Instead, teams of leaders-exceptional deputies who forge great partnerships to maximize both organizational and personal success-do that work.

Heenan and Bennis believe that in order to understand what makes an organization excel, you must look beyond the Bill Gateses of the world. This is the first comprehensive study of co-leaders and their often quiet power, written for CEOs, managers, and anyone else interested in modern organizations. Co-Leaders is an in-depth examination of a dozen great partners, including Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Bob Lutz of Chrysler, Bill Guthridge, coach of the University of North Carolina basketball team, and Anne Sullivan Macy, Helen Keller's teacher.

Because of the changing nature of corporate leadership, a new Silicon Valley model of success has emerged, in which the boss and subordinate appear more like peers, with a focus on great partnerships. At an increasing number of hot high-tech firms, talent, not titles, is the source of power. Today's deputy can become tomorrow's CEO in these collegial, non-hierarchical organizations simply by walking out the door with his or her breakthrough idea. Good ideas belong, at least initially, to the people who have them, not the company or the boss, which is why this new egalitarianism is more than just a fashion statement—it's a matter of survival. Co-leaders have both executive and subordinate experience, making them better suited to the needs of the new millennium, in which men and women who can command and follow will be the most valuable assets of any organization.

Among the best books on teamwork, Co-Leaders is for anyone who wants to make his or her organization great. This book demonstrates how, by viewing the enterprise through the eyes of inspired deputies, both organizations and individuals can benefit from a more inclusive, less celebrity-oriented definition of leadership. This ground-breaking book advocate for a new paradigm in which gifted leaders and their talented co-leaders collaborate to make their organizations stronger, more agile, more equitable... and ultimately more successful.

Author: David A. Heenan and Warren Bennis

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Co-Leaders-Power-Partnerships-David-Heenan/dp/0471361208/