Smart Teams

Learn how your team can communicate, congregate and collaborate more effectively than ever

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to build a culture where productivity thrives. This book shows you how to turn around the unproductive team behaviours that create friction. You'll learn the 'superproductive' behaviours that promote flow and the most impactful productivity principles for working better together. Smart Teams shares the practical guidelines and key skills you need to lead a productive, cooperative team.

Email noise, unproductive meetings and poorly organised projects can stifle creativity and disrupt everyone's workflow. A culture that isn't productive results in long hours, more stress, and a lack of balance. But by raising awareness of how our behaviours impact our work and our colleagues, you build the desire and capability to change within your team. This book is packed with tips, guidelines and expert insights for leaders and managers at any level.

• Foster a culture of 'superproductivity'
• Create a set of Smart Team principles to guide cooperation
• Run fewer, shorter and more effective meetings
• Collaborate more productively on projects
• Reduce urgency, interruptions and email noise

People want their work to matter, they want to make an impact and they want to do it all with a healthy work-life balance. Productivity is the key to making it all happen! Smart Teams shows you how to implement the culture shift that will allow your team to flourish.

This book is part of the Smart Productivity series, helping readers find practical solutions for better managing their time, energy and focus.

About the Author ix

Acknowledgements x

How to Use This Book xiii

Introduction xv

Part I: Moving from friction to flow 1

1 Enabling productive flow 7

2 Qualities of a smart team 21

3 Changing team behaviours 29

Part II: Working better together 47

4 Communicate: make less noise 53

5 Congregate: make meetings count 91

6 Collaborate: make projects great 135

7 Key skills for effective cooperation 171

Part III: Building a smart team culture 191

8 Creating a more productive culture 195

9 Some productivity projects 207

Postscript 217

DERMOT CROWLEY is an author, speaker, and the founder and director of Adapt Productivity, a leading training and coaching service in Australia.

Cut Through Productivity Barriers and Help Your Team Take Back Control

With the constant noise of incoming email, packed schedules of ineffective meetings and lengthy projects with poorly-defined objectives, it is tougher than ever for teams to be truly productive.

From productivity expert and best-selling author Dermot Crowley, Smart Teams shows you how to build a superproductive team culture with clear principles, simple steps and everyday actions.

You’ll learn how to:

• communicate more effectively and generate less noise
• congregate around a shared purpose to make meetings count
• collaborate better to make projects more productive.

Smart Teams shows you how to reduce noise and implement changes that will allow your team to flourish.