High Five! None of Us Is as Smart as All of Us

High Five! was given to me as a gift. Once again the authors have created a rememberable story line to drive home the basics of teamwork. This is an easy to read book (I read it in 3 evenings). The story is about a 5th grade hockey squade that becomes an "undefeated" team. Easy to relate to the workplace. I strongly recommend this inexpensive book for all team leaders in your organization.

This book is centered on an ice hockey team of ten-year-old boys. Traditionally, the boys who scored the maximum goals would receive the "best player award". This team also followed this concept and every player focussed on scoring the goal himself without passing the puck. When a player gets the puck, his parents would cheer " Strike-Boy-Strike". This team NEVER won a tournament.The new coach who joins this team analyses the problem and changes the reward mechanism. The player who scored the goal gets 1 point.The player who passed the puck to the scorer gets 2 points.The goalkeeper who prevented a hostile goal gets 3 points.There was also weightage for the factor (Goals scored/ No of strikes).Suddenly this team starts playing differently. More goals are scored than before and the team starts winning match after match. Alan Foster is this new coach. Alan had recently lost his job for lack of team skills. He is guided by Miss Weatherby, an aging African-American retired teacher and champion girls' basketball coach.There is lots of similarity between a sports team and teams at the work place. This book is a superb training guide for scoring team goals - for the Organization.

This book has a great storyline in it. But what it teaches about teamwork is magnificent. One thing that it teaches is that getting your star out of the lineup for a while can actually help the team. I believe corporate America often misses that. And it's a book that is easily read. I reccommend it to everyone.

A great book for not only the blue collar workers but the ivory tower group (especially) as well. Blanchard and Company again take a complicated subject such as teamwork and make it so simple by putting it in a parable format. Once the reader sees how these timeless principles apply to a 5th grade hockey team, Alan applies the same principles in his work life.This would be a great read for our kid's coaches too!

I found this book to be totally delightful as a model for how to be a better adult coach of a children's team. For many years, I have recommended that all those who want to learn how to be better leaders and managers begin by taking on these coaching chores. This is the first book I have ever seen that successfully captures the important principles of coaching these teams. This book deserves many more than five stars for that accomplishment!The benefits of that are many. First, the players will get a role model of how to cooperate in order to be more effective. Second, the coaches will learn how to be better leaders, and will be able to use that skill in other areas of their lives. Third, the parents will learn what to encourage their children to do in order to get the most from the team experience, and this will bring parents and their children closer together. The book's fable boils down to four key principles:(1) The team needs a shared purpose, values and goals.(2) Skills need to be developed individually that enhance the team's effectiveness.(3) Enhance team effectiveness by integrating the individual skills properly.(4) Repeatedly reward and recognize individuals for taking actions that enhance team effectiveness.A weakness of the fable is that it doesn't give enough attention to how to achieve the first principle for the typical team. My suggestion is that you poll your players before the first practice to find out what their purposes, goals, and values are. Then hold a meeting to discuss what you learned, and build a consensus from there. My experience has been that 99 percent of the players want to have fun, want to improve, and win at least a few games. Be sure to find out what they think is "fun" because it's often different from what the coaches would assume. Fun usually turns out to be loosely supervised scrimmaging time. When that was the case, I ran a brief such scrimmage at the end of every practice until the last player was picked up by her or his parents. The other place where I would like to make a suggestion is about recognition. I was a coach for 14 years, and I found that giving individual awards to every player for every game worked very well. Everybody does something right at least once in a game. I would make a note of it, describe the reasons for each award, and hand out a little token at the end of each game for each such award. At the end of the season, the player could turn in these tokens for other forms of recognition. I also shouted out the person's name and award when they won one. That way, each child could be a winner every time we played, even if the team lost. And we did not lose very often. The players loved to win those awards for passing, defense, and offense. Scoring accounted for well less than 10 percent of the awards in my experience. This book has one of the best exercises I have ever seen for convincing people to work on team skills. You divide the players into the "best" ma