Appreciative Team Building

Positive Questions to Bring Out the Best of Your Team

Diana Whitney, Amanda Trosten-Bloom, Jay Cherney, Ron Fry iUniverse, Inc. (2005),ISBN 0595335039, Paperback (108 pages), $15.95

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Appreciative Team Building provides you and your team with everything you need to discover the keys to past successes and future possibilities by igniting engaging conversations. Providing 48 positive questions, sample interview guides, and a step-by-step process for self-managed inquiry, this book breaks new ground in the development of high performance teams. Choose positive questions on any one of eight topics that are pivotal to team development; then follow a step-by-step self-managed appreciative inquiry process that guides your team – your unique collection of relationships – towards its highest potential.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Ten Ways to Use Positive Questions to Build High Performance Teams
3. Forty-Eight Positive Questions to Bring Out the Best of Your Team:

• Aligning Purpose and Goals
• Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
• Fostering Supportive and Empowering Relationships
• Creating Clear and Shared Procedures
• Promoting Leadership
• Elevating Energy and Spirit
• Advancing productivity and Performance
• Stimulating Purposeful and Uplifting Communication

4. Positive Team Development: A Self-Managed Appreciative Inquiry
5. Building Your Own Interview Guides
6. Conclusion

In Praise of Appreciative Team Building:

Book review by Andy Smith, Director, AI Consulting Ltd.

Whether the team with which you work is in a large or small business, in a non-profit organization, or in a community group, you’ll find this book a wonderful resource. Appreciative Team Building explains the power that results from positive, appreciative questions. Using the strategies, suggestions, sample interview guides and 48 ’starting point’ questions provided in this book, you can help your team to shift from conversations that are problem-saturated (as they so often can tend to be in our current society) to conversations filled with new creativity, hope and possibility. Also clearly explained is a step-by-step process of Appreciative Inquiry that you can use to guide your team to achieve its own and its members very best potential. Highly recommended!

Sue James
Melbourne, Australia

The book was fabulous! I found it really helpful – it is conceptually right on and it is a great and useful tool. Bottom line – it fires up both sides of my brain!

Susan Copple
HR Director
Hewlett Packard Company

This book is full of provocative and positive questions that will develop and enhance your team’s performance, yielding faster and better results.

Julie Meiresonne
Director, Customer Relations
Hunter Douglas Window Fashions Division
Broomfield, CO