What makes teamwork really work? #TeamHabits


Hello Reader,

This week, my friend Charlie Gilkey is launching a new book, Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results.

I was a big fan of his first book, Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done. (See my video review here.) Charlie has once again proven his ability to navigate the complex world of productivity, but this time he's focusing on teamwork and collaboration, offering insights that are both profound and practical.

Team Habits is not just another book about teamwork; it's a guide to understanding the hidden dynamics that make teams thrive. From power dynamics to personal relationships, from embracing the hybrid future of work to navigating trends like the "quiet quitting" phenomenon, this book covers it all.

Like my own book, Marketing Yourself: How to Elevate your Personal Platform to the Next Level , the book offers a choose-your-own-adventure style of reading. You can identify which of the eight categories of Team Habits are causing the most issues, based on the Team Habits Assessment, and skip right to the chapters that matter most to you:

  1. Belonging
  2. Decision-making
  3. Goal-setting and prioritization
  4. Planning
  5. Communication
  6. Collaboration
  7. Meetings
  8. Core Team Habits

If you've ever felt that your team could be more productive, more cohesive, and more aligned with your organization's goals, this book is sure to be a valuable read.

video preview

🚀 Transform your team's dynamics with #TeamHabits

This book focuses on the 4-10 closest professional relationships you have. Even as a solopreneur, I've found the frameworks and advice to be universally applicable to how I interact with clients, with my virtual assistants, and with my professional colleagues.

Team Habits will help you foster a sense of belonging within your team, enhance communication and collaboration, and shift the focus from personal productivity to systemic team dynamics.

What I like about this book is how the advice works for any member of a team. Whether you're a team leader, a team member, or an organization looking to transform the way you work, Team Habits offers actionable insights and practical tools to make teamwork work.

Learn more about Team Habits at BetterTeamHabits.com.

AI Coaching Newsletter

Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.

Read more from AI Coaching Newsletter

📊 “Context engineering is the strategic process of selecting, packaging, and managing the most relevant information for each step.” - Antonio Gullí Hello Reader, In July 2025, Gartner told AI leaders that “context engineering is in, and prompt engineering is out.” The past year, people on the bleeding edge of AI have been paying attention to framing. 💡 Context engineering prepares everything prior to the prompt. Even the best prompts will fail without the right context. Giving AI backstory...

🗂️ "An AI Agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal." - Simon Willison Hello Reader, Generative AI makes things for you. Agentic AI does things for you. This distinction, between making and doing, is the next step on the exponential curve of capability. An AI Agent can initiate and execute tasks independently, finding the best way to transition from an initial state to a goal state by using any tools it has available, as often as it is capable of doing. In his excellent primer on AI...

🌱 “It’s clear that we are well into the adoption phase of AI, but not everyone is adapting.” - Lou Compagnone Hello Reader, I was in Wellington this week for the #AotearoaAISummit, the annual festival hosted by the AI Forum New Zealand. I livetweeted the event on LinkedIn (live-posted? doesn't have the same flavour) on the hashtag linked above, and I made AI anime illustrations of all the speakers. You can see my takeaways (and my art) below: (Please note - other than the illustrations, no AI...