Be a Better Team by Friday

About the Author

Justin Follin and David Butlein Greenspan, PhD, bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the realm of team dynamics and leadership. Both authors have extensive backgrounds in consulting with high-performing teams and leaders across various industries. Follin has dedicated his career to enhancing team performance, while Greenspan, with a PhD in Organizational Psychology, provides a deep understanding of human behavior and team psychology. Together, they combine their expertise to offer actionable strategies for leaders aiming to build high-performance teams quickly.

Main Idea

Be a Better Team by Friday: A Playbook for High-Performance Business Leaders is designed to transform your team from ordinary to extraordinary in a matter of days. The book emphasizes practical, repeatable practices that leaders can implement immediately to foster better collaboration, engagement, and productivity. The core premise is that the gap between your team's current performance and its potential can be bridged swiftly with the right mindset, practices, and tools. The authors lay out a comprehensive roadmap to help leaders cultivate a high-performance culture, drive motivation, and achieve outstanding results.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Chapter 1: Choose Your Mindset
3. Chapter 2: Get Real With Each Other
4. Chapter 3: Know the “Fundamental Why”
5. Chapter 4: Give Feedback Like a Coach
6. Chapter 5: Adapt Your Work Style
7. Chapter 6: Get Focused
8. Chapter 7: Get It Done
9. Conclusion: Put It into Practice

Introduction

The title of this book, Be a Better Team by Friday, is both an assertion and a promise. The assertion is that your team’s performance can improve dramatically in just a few business days. The promise is that the practices outlined in this book will get you there. Each chapter provides a practice derived from years of working with leaders and high-performance teams, aimed at developing the necessary skills to transform any group of talented individuals into a cohesive, high-performing team.

Chapter 1: Choose Your Mindset

Being a great leader is not easy. Challenges will seem insurmountable, but great leaders navigate these obstacles and achieve their goals regardless. The first step to greatness is choosing to be great. This chapter emphasizes the importance of mindset in leadership. Your mindset determines how you perceive and respond to situations. By choosing an empowered mindset, you can shift from a place of negativity to one of possibility and action.

"Your mindset is your choice. It is the answer to the question, 'How am I thinking about this right now?'" - Justin Follin

The three steps to help your team move from a disempowered to an empowered mindset include:

• Realizing you are in a disempowered mindset through self-awareness.
• Choosing an empowered mindset by shifting from complaining to creating, rescuing to coaching, and blaming to challenging.
• Coaching each other to maintain empowered mindsets.

Choosing your mindset is foundational because it shapes every action and reaction within the team. Leaders must model the mindset they want their team to adopt. This includes recognizing the negativity bias, which makes it easier to focus on what’s wrong rather than what’s going well. By consciously choosing an empowered mindset, leaders and teams can overcome obstacles with resilience and creativity.

Chapter 2: Get Real With Each Other

Trust is the foundation of any high-performing team. Building trust requires open, honest, and vulnerable communication. This chapter focuses on the practice of deep listening to foster psychological safety and trust within the team. Listening to understand rather than to respond helps create a more inclusive and collaborative environment.

"High trust equals high performance." - David Butlein Greenspan

The disciplines of deep listening include: