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

A quartet of authors, principals in the Trispective Group consulting firm, lay out an optimistic but insufficiently specific blueprint to improving corporate cultures. The four have worked with thousands of clients across many industries, and in their experience, some form of dysfunction usually holds companies back from peak performance. This slim team-building guide calls on bosses to create an atmosphere of trust, honesty, and fair-minded behavior. The authors break down the different kinds of companies into four categories; these, from least to most successful, are as follows: saboteurs, benign saboteurs, situational loyalists, and loyalists. In this schema, loyalist companies comprise smart, accomplished people who trust, challenge, and push one another. Since the authors—unsurprisingly—favor the last model, they built their consulting firm on it. They walk readers through diagnosing which kind of team you have and solving team-specific issues; case studies for each kind of team appear throughout. The friendly tone and the narrative format are appealing and readers facing specific problems addressed here are likely to find this book encouraging, but the model excludes far too many dysfunctions to be truly useful. (Sept.)