Big Teams

This is a book about working with large teams of people. Whether your team involves 30 people or 3,000, the organizational dynamics are significantly different for a project manager used to dealing with smaller teams. As the project scales up in size and complexity, the processes and skills required change. As project leader, your focus moves from the technical aspects of project delivery to enabling, facilitating and integrating the different sub teams into a cohesive whole.

Big Teams examines the research on team dynamics and the latest thinking on leadership in a project or program environment. It features stories and case studies based on interviews with project leaders from a range of major projects and programs.

Structured around three core themes - Alignment, Engagement, and Resilience - it gives you invaluable, practical guidance on setting up and running an effective team of teams.

As with all Tony Llewellyn's books, Big Teams is written in an accessible style with the focus on real-world application, but the academic underpinning is rigorous and will be a useful reference for any student studying project leadership.

List of figures .............................................................................................vii

List of tables...............................................................................................ix

Preface ....................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1 A model of team performance ........................................... 5

Chapter 2 Leading a Big Team ............................................................25

Chapter 3 Building a culture of alignment .......................................51

Chapter 4 Team set-up.........................................................................71

Chapter 5 Accelerated learning ..........................................................97

Chapter 6 Maintain engagement ......................................................121

Chapter 7 Feedback and behavioural risk .......................................145

Chapter 8 Building resilience ............................................................159

Chapter 9 A leap of faith ...................................................................177

References ...............................................................................................181

Index .......................................................................................................189