The Loyalist Team ─ How Trust, Candor, and Authenticity Create Great Organizations

Great teams make it look easy. They create brilliant products, deliver excellent service, and achieve extraordinary results. From the outside, it's easy to imagine that these stellar teams must be made up of extraordinary individuals, or mortals blended together by great chemistry. But neither is true. Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, and can mean the difference between success and failure in any company.

To write this groundbreaking book, four extraordinary women with a combined century of experience at the highest levels of corporate America have studied thousands of teams. They call the highest-achieving dream teams Loyalist Teams, because on those teams, individuals are loyal to one another, the team, and the larger organization. Members work to ensure each other's success as they work to ensure their own. They operate with absolute candor and refuse to let each other fail. As a result of these behaviors, they enjoy their work and always exceed performance expectations for their companies.

The most effective teams share specific characteristics and traits that are identifiable and replicable, and include loyalty, honesty, and trust.

In The Loyalist Team, the authors explain the ways teams break down and provide clear examples of the the most toxic, dysfunctional teams that hamper progress. Readers will undoubtedly see their own experiences in revealing profiles of low-performing teams such as Saboteur Teams, Benign Saboteur Teams, and Situational Loyalist Teams. But wherever their current team falls on the spectrum, readers will find an accessible way to understand their own team dynamic, diagnose problems, and take the necessary steps to become the best kind of team--a Loyalist Team--that consistently delivers extraordinary value.

Linda Adams, Abby Curnow-Chavez, Audrey Epstein, and Rebecca Teasdale (with a century of combined experience) honed their expertise inside some of the largest and most powerful businesses operating today. The four authors have led the human resources, talent management, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness functions of multiple Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Company, Pepsi, and Target. Currently, the four comprise the TriSpective Group, catering to companies like PetSmart, Kaiser, Orbitz, and others.