Building Teams, Building People: Expanding the Fifth Resource

Here is an update of the previous edition, more relevant for the new millennium. The classic resources in management and team building are people, money, facilities and time. Increasingly, though, the fifth resource_energy_is becoming more crucial. Each chapter of this book deals with one of the five building blocks or resources and concludes with suggested activities and events that managers can use to build that resource. The authors also show the importance of using all five resources together for a manager to be effective. It is important to note that team building is not itself an activity, but the result of attending to the seventeen characteristics that demarcate effective teamwork. When these characteristics exist to a high degree, you have an effective team. It is the manager’s job to assess the strength of these characteristics in the organization and then to remediate any weakness. Building upon the strengths of the people in the organization ensures that a manager is building for the future. This widely read practical guide is free of technical jargon, with many examples of successful implementation.

Thomas R. Harvey is a professor of Organizational Leadership in the doctoral program at the University of La Verne in La Verne, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He has been the dean of Organizational Management and chairman of the Department of Educational Management for 14 years. He has consulted with over 400 businesses, schools, and public institutions, as well as having been a City Councilman for 20 years. Harvey is the author of Strategies for Significant Survival, Checklist for Change (1995, ScarecrowEducation), and co-author of The Practical Decision Maker (1997, ScarecrowEducation). Bonita Drolet is an assistant superintendent of Educational Services for the Encinitas Union School District in San Diego County, California. Previously, she was an elementary principal in the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District in Orange County, California. She honed her passion for improving education while serving as a principal in Ontario, California and Charter Oak, California before moving to Bryant Ranch School. At Bryant Ranch, a National Blue Ribbon School, she was able to actualize the creation and implementation of the ideas and strategies found in Building Teams, Building People.