How NASA Builds Teams (ePub)

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams tocompete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant totraditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding.
To improve communication, performance, and morale amongNASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr.Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in"How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven,quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time andresources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process hasboosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams,engineering teams, and management teams, including the peopleresponsible for NASA’s most complexsystems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes,robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASABuilds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can beapplied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-linebehavioral assessment to help your team and the individual membersunderstand each other and measure the key driver of teamperformance, the social context.
Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly totechnical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerinapplies simple, elegant principles from his physics background tothe art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system toanalyze the characteristics of team performance into actionableelements.
The author illustrates the teambuilding process withentertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director forAstrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASAand outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processesin the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix theHubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror.
Free downloadable resources will help you:

• Identify your teammates’ innate personalities
• Diagram your culture (And compare it to yourcustomer’s)
• Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (Getthis wrong and you will be fired!) and
• Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you.

Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerfultool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: theContext Shifting Worksheet.