The Power of a Positive Team: Proven Principles and Practices that Make Great Teams Great, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of The Power of a Positive Team: Proven Principles and Practices that Make Great Teams Great. Available from Amazon here.

A book about teams to help teams become more positive, united and connected.

Worldwide bestseller — the author of The Energy Bus and The Power of Positive Leadership shares the proven principles and practices that build great teams – and provides practical tools to help teams overcome negativity and enhance their culture, communication, connection, commitment and performance.

Jon Gordon has personally worked with some of the most successful teams on the planet and has a keen understanding of how and why they became great. In The Power of a Positive Team, Jon draws upon his unique team building experience as well as conversations with some of the greatest teams in history in order to provide an essential framework, filled with proven practices, to empower teams to work together more effectively and achieve superior results.

Utilizing examples from the writing team who created the hit show Billions, the National Champion Clemson Football team, the World Series contending Los Angeles Dodgers, The Miami Heat and the greatest beach volleyball team of all time to Navy SEAL’s, Marching bands, Southwest Airlines, USC and UVA Tennis, Twitter, Apple and Ford, Jon shares innovative strategies to transform a group of individuals into a united, positive and powerful team.

There is a lot to potentially like in this book. Positive attitude in people and in teams sounds like a great idea. Gordon also has some good examples of where it has demonstrably had an effect. At the same time this is a short book too, so the challenge is to give some real meat to accompany the assertion that being positive is a good and ‘positive’ thing to do. If not, in such a short book, you run the risk of succumbing to being a mere parody of a truism.

Gordon clearly has access to some very interesting, inspirational and insightful coaches and team managers from the world of sport and beyond. This is what appealed to us as we began to review this book. A mere 140 pages later the book was done and it felt like we had name checked many of these great coaches but never really engaged and dug into their insights into how to do things right, well and better than your rivals. Yes there were hugs for team players, and times when they actually got to know their team mates better, but what else did they do? It is important to be positive, it is important to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. We get this, and agree with it, and we recognise that business books should not be too long, but, as the book’s dust jacket illustrates, with 10 thumbnails for other books by the author, you do begin to wonder if this one was phoned in.

It is a good book, as far as it goes, and we enjoyed reading it, but perhaps it could have delivered a little more content for the reader?

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