High Five – The Magic of Working Together

High Five – The Magic of Working Together

- Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

(Score 9/10: Quick reader, entertaining and informative)

PUCK – The key to building high performance teams.

P: Providing clear purpose and values. A compelling reason for being.

·         Create a challenge – a reason for being that commits and motivates people to work together.

·         Set clear and compelling goals, both for individual and team

·         Create a team charter that formalizes commitments to each other and clearly states what the team wants to accomplish, why it is important.

U: Unleashing and developing skills.

·         Start with the basics. Provide feedback to build skills, confidence and accountability.

·         Learn each others roles

C: Creating Team Power – none of us is as smart as all of us.

·         Share leadership, reward team work.

·         For example, Make 6 sets of cards, each set containing numerals 0 to 9. The conductor will call out a number between 0 and 27. Each side has to hold up three cards and the cards have to add up to whatever number is called out (obviously, there will be at least 3 members on each side – the more the better!)

·         Trick – If the number called out is above 18, member 3 holds up 9, else holds up 0. If the number is between 10 and 18, member 2 holds up 9, else holds up 0. Member 3 will hold out the number equal to the sum of digits of the number called out.

K: Keeping the accent on the positive. 3Rs – Repeated Reward and Recognition.

·         Look for behaviors that reflect the purpose and values., skill development and teamwork and reward, reward, reward those behaviors.

·         Catch people doing things right or approximately right

·         Re-direct towards goal, do not punish

·         Link all recognition and reward back to purpose and goals.