1. The author assigns a team-player quality to each chapter and develops that idea throughout the chapter, but the apparent focus on developing the quality in the reader either assumes that others on the team are going to be reading the same book or trusts that the reader's ability to develop these qualities will translate into an example so clear and shining that other teammates will naturally follow. How does the author deal with the dynamics of interaction with other team members?
Interaction with others looms large as the key phrase in this question. The difficulty with attempting to turn to the index to look it up and evaluate how the author treats it or any synonymous expression thereof is that there is no index in this book. One is forced to go back to the table of contents to look for clues to where interaction becomes a principal theme.
One way Maxwell deals with interaction of team members is to put the lot of them under the authority of a leader who has the power to coerce team-oriented compliance. That is in the background of Chapter 4, "Communicative: A Team Is Many Voices With a Single Heart" (Maxwell, 2002, p. 28). Ostensibly, the chapter deals with the importance of communicating with other teammates as a means of opening up channels of understanding and cooperation; however, a careful reading of the case study Maxwell chooses to illustrate how effective communication can be implemented as a goal and an achievement suggests that team members themselves cannot necessarily be relied on to create the single heart.
The story of the racial integration of the Alexandria, Virginia, high-school football team is driven not from within the team but from the efforts of a coach who seems to have been determined to make the plan work. As Maxwell explains, the coach used the threat of intensive practice drills to exact from the black and white players behavior that was meant to foster understanding and appreciation of the re...