Turning People into Teams

Turning People into Teams is a treasure trove of exercises to help your team work better together and accomplish more, no matter what discipline you work in. I look forward to sharing this book with leaders in design, product, and engineering. --Katie Dill, Vice President of Design, Lyft From strengthening relationships when forming new teams to project delivery and evaluation, the rituals and routines in Turning People into Teams will level up your project management process and guide you to the best possible outcomes. --Leslie Lindo, Director of Community Engagement, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies I love the Sherwins' articulation of how rituals can be used for real strategic advantage. What I love even more is that using rituals can be one of the most inexpensive, rapid ways to drive meaningful change in your organization. --Linda Quarles, Director, Strategy + Organizational Design, frog Bringing together people with different perspectives and areas of expertise is always a challenge. In Turning People into Teams, the Sherwins equip teams with the context and exercises needed to help them understand each other, break down barriers, and align on long-term goals. Using these exercises with my company's cross-disciplinary teams of designers, engineers, product managers, and data scientists has already led to several breakthroughs in how we identify goals, share feedback, and work together. --Patrick Weiss, Director of Product Design, Omada Health In Turning People into Teams, the Sherwins share practical rituals, routines, and activities that help teams understand what it means to exhibit ownership, values, and integrity as individual contributors to a collective effort. Curating best practices from corporations, nonprofits, and academia, this book has insights into building effective teams and transforming how they work. --Ratna Desai, Director of Product Design, Netflix When working on teams, you might not always get to choose whom you work with--but you should definitely choose to read this book. Turning People into Teams enlightens the reader with an inspiring, common-sense approach on how to turn a group of individuals into a team that functions on multiple levels. The Sherwins practice what they preach, and this book gets rid of the fluff and provides a practical mindset and corresponding tools to evaluate your team's rituals, behaviors, and values. They prove that it's possible for almost anyone to learn the etiquette of collaboration. --Alie Rose and Simona Maschi, cofounders of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design In a world with so much written about team processes for greater development speed and effectiveness, Turning People into Teams provides immediately usable tools for any kind of team to work better together. For anyone leading a multidisciplinary team, this book provides simple frameworks for getting at the hard challenges of team dynamics and a common format for engaging your team that can be experimented with and freely adapted to work within any context. Many changemakers and writers focus on the initial stages of ensuring a team is aligned to a shared goal. While this is critical, in my work helping organizations transform to be more innovative, I find the true test of change to be how it plays out over time. The Sherwins provide not only effective methods for framing the problem to be solved but also tools for completing a team's efforts and learning from what has been done. Written in a tone that invites readers to craft their own solutions, this book offers a way of approaching teamwork that you and your team can own and adapt to your needs. --Turi McKinley, Executive Director, Org Activation, frog