Ignition: A Guide to Building High-Performing Teams

This is hands down, the most comprehensive, scientifically grounded, and practical team effectiveness resource available. Everything a practitioner or insightful leader could need is in here - even the tools and provocative questions that you may not think of until you read them in this book and think, "Of course, why didn't I already think of that? It's so obviously necessary to improving team effectiveness." Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for publishing this treasure. Teams that dig and apply what's here will be well poised to beat the competition and achieve the most amazing goals.

This book takes theory and translates it into action. Very helpful for those of us coaching teams and team leaders. The examples and tools are very clear.

Arrived in great condition.

Gordy and Dianne’s book “Ignition” is my “Go to Manual” for actionable, real-world tested tools for building high performing teams. I build high performing product development teams in a complex, fast paced medical device company. This is ALL I do, and I’m telling you, Gordy and Dianne’s book is the best.Lencioni’s book might be catchy, but it’s just good marketing and lacks actionable, real-word, evidence based tools. And Lencioni’s cases are just made up and unrealistic. Many of the team leaders I work with remember Tuckman’s forming-storming-norming-performing, but they don’t know the next steps to pull together a team. Hackman’s model is too academic and complex. And Drexler/Sibbet model is too complex for the corporate teams I work with in a fast-paced environment. They don’t’ want theory, they want straight forwards tools that get to the heart of the matter without too much “hr processey stuff”. Finally, Kasperowski's High Performance Teams is good, especially for software teams, but it's guidance is too narrow on just team norms.The closest book to Ignition, in terms of actionable guidance, is Wisdom of Teams, but Ignition is updated with topics like virtual teams. But Gordy’s Rocket Model is better in terms of giving clear guidance on where to start and that is very important, helping teams prioritize their development action plan.One of the best parts of Ignition is how it’s organized by problem/situation and then the solution. The situations are very common, e.g., kicking off a new team, taking a team from good to great, combining teams, onboarding new team members, and fixing a broken team.As an experienced facilitator, I appreciate the detailed offsite agendas which give real-world context to where and how long to facilitate the tools. The agendas are gold!Plus, on top of all this value, you can download the tool tools in powerpoint or pdf!! What could be easier! Gordy and Dianne have done all the heavy lifting for you.Just buy this book and give it to every team leader you know!

Research-based yet extremely practical. Addresses different team building scenarios (e.g. merging teams, launching a new team, fixing existing teams...) and contains 40 field-tested team improvement activities (e.g. discovering team mission, aligning on team context, creating team rules...). Except for the recommended online questionnaires (Hogan, Team Assessment Survey, Wingfinder), all of them are ready to use with teams with no additional investment. This is a real gem in applied team psychology from experts in the field. The book builds on the earlier Rocket Model of teamwork (published in 2012). A must-read for anyone in leadership, team coaching, Agile project management, organizational development or HR.

Masterful and comprehensive. The best thing about this book is that it’s grounded in reality. It’s a practical field guide to how to most effectively create and lead teams. Lots of books talk theory. This one tells you how. If you lead teams and want high performing teams, buy this book.

This book highlights a number of ways for teams to diagnose and repair crucial elements for team performance. The segmentation of types of teams (e.g. "broken" vs. "new") is very useful in considering your approach as a leader or practitioner to solve problems. This sits next to my desk at all times, and find myself thumbing through it for ideas and leveraging the activities when planning team strategy sessions. Highly recommend!