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High Five Book Analysis Blanchard and Bowles

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“High Five! The Magic of Working Together” Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles “High Five! The Magic of Working Together” by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles offers four keys to developing a highly effective team. The authors use a parable story telling technique about a youth recreation hockey league, the Warriors, to demonstrate how implementing the four concepts can turn around a team to success. They parallel the process to show how the same techniques can be used in the business world. The title “High Five” is used to express the practice of “high fiving”, the slapping of hands in the air by teammates, to demonstrate the togetherness of a group of people coming together with passion and excitement. The high …show more content…

The four members of my group are all intelligent but every week, as a group, we produce better work than if I had done it on my own. We laughingly say we “have flow” and have even written flow on the wipe board as we begin tough assignments. We have each learned each other’s skill set and we depend on each other to contribute and make the end product better. There is no individual star in our Medaille study group. Instead we shine brightly as a single, better entity. We choose our name based on the definition of gestalt. According to the Webster’s dictionary online, gestalt is defined as: “ a structure, arrangement, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts “ (www.merriam-webster.com). I think what the authors are saying has been proven in how we developed our learning team. We learned that we were better together than we were individually. Our commitment to the team grew stronger because we recognized our output was better if done collectively. 4. Keeping the accent on the positive by repeated reward and recognition. The last part of the team performance equation is that individuals and teams need positive recognition. Concentrating on the positives, rather then the negatives, allows employees to focus on doing better because they want to hear positive recognition. The focus should be on how to perform more

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