Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to
compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to
traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding.
To improve communication, performance, and morale among
NASA's technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr.
Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in
"How NASA Builds Teams"--an approach that is proven,
quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and
resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has
boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams,
engineering teams, and management teams, including the people
responsible for NASA's most complex
systems -- the Space Shuttle, space telescopes,
robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA
Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be
applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line
behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members
understand each other and measure the key driver of team
performance, the social context.
Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to
technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin
applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to
the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to
analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable
elements.
The author illustrates the teambuilding process with
entertaining stories from his decade as NASA's Director for
Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA
and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes
in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the
Hubble Space Telescope's flawed mirror.
Free downloadable resources will help you:
* Identify your teammates' innate personalities
* Diagram your culture (And compare it to your
customer's)
* Measure the coherency of your project's paradigm (Get
this wrong and you will be fired!) and
* Learn to meet people's need to feel valued by you.
Further, you can download and use Pellerin's most powerful
tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the
Context Shifting Worksheet.
