How Nasa Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills For Scientists, Engineers, And Project Teams9780470456484

　　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 among NASA's technical teams, former NASAAstrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuildingprocess described in "How NASA Builds Teams"--an approach that isproven, 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 complex systems -- the Space Shuttle,space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon."How NASA Builds Teams" explains how the 4-D teambuilding processcan be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, freeon-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individualmembers understand each other and measure the key driver of teamperformance, the social context. Moreover, these simple, logicalprocesses appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew"touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegantprinciples from his physics background to the art teambuilding,such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze thecharacteristics of team performance into actionable elements. Theauthor illustrates the teambuilding process with entertainingstories from his decade as NASA's Director for Astrophysics andsubsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outsidebusiness teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the bookenabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble SpaceTelescope's flawed mirror. Free downloadable resources will helpyou: Identify your teammates' innate personalities Diagram yourculture (And compare it to your customer's) Measure the coherencyof your project's paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired )and Learn to meet people's need to feel valued by you. Further, youcan download and use Pellerin's most powerful tool for influencingthe outcome of any difficult situation: the Context ShiftingWorksheet.