Introduction

I HATE THIS *@#!! TEAM

We’ve all muttered foul words under our breath as we gnashed our teeth, shook our heads and shuffled along to another meeting with the ‘team from hell.’  We are all sadly familiar with at least one profoundly ineffective gathering of souls which generally does nothing but suck up great portions of our valuable time while causing vast amounts of stress and frustration.  Amazingly, a large number of work teams seem to be chugging along in just that manner.

This eBook and handbook is meant to bring those expletives out of the closet in order to describe how we REALLY feel about teams.  Then we can begin to do something to make them better.  Work teams in organizations are expected to produce results, results which contribute to the profitable outputs of that organization.  If they don’t, they are pretty well useless.

This eBook examines what it is that transforms teams into such awful monsters.  It uses plain language to reveal what’s really going on; a reality that can be concealed by fancy words and meaningless jargon.  It presents some simple indicators to help you assess whether or not your team is caught up in one of these hateful traps, and it offers some simple suggestions for improvement.

Work with this eBook and these posts.  Annotate, print and draw, share, make up new four letter words to describe your most hated team.  Make up new reasons to hate it.  After that, step back and have a good chuckle at what your team is really like.  Laughter is a great precursor to accepting what is, and after acceptance can come honest change.  And laughter is a much easier stepping off point than rage, tears or apathy.

So, let’s see what your team is really like….. *#@!!%…

Discussion and comment points for this post:

1. What’s your number 1 reason to hate work teams?