Team building

Team building is a philosophy of job design in which employees are viewed as members of interdependent teams instead of as individual workers. Team Building refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance. Team building is pursued via a variety of practices, and can range from simple bonding exercises to complex simulations and multi-day team building retreats designed to develop a team (including group assessment and group-dynamic games), usually falling somewhere in between. It generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development, but can also be applied to sports teams, school groups, and other contexts. Team building is not to be confused with "team recreation" that consists of activities for teams that are strictly recreational. Team-building can also be seen in day-to-day operations of an organization and team dynamic can be improved through successful leadership. Team building is an important factor in any environment, its focus is to specialize in bringing out the best in a team to ensure self development, positive communication, leadership skills and the ability to work closely together as a team to problem solve.

Work environments tend to focus on individuals and personal goals, with reward & recognition singling out the achievements of individual employees. "How to create effective teams is a challenge in every organization" Team building can also refer to the process of selecting or creating a team from scratch.

Reasons for Team Building

Reasons for team building include:

• Improving communication and relationships
• Making the workplace more enjoyable
• Motivating a team
• Boosting morale
• Getting to know each other
• Getting everyone "onto the same page", including goal setting
• Teaching the team self-regulation strategies
• Helping participants to learn more about themselves (strengths and weaknesses)
• Identifying and utilizing the strengths of team members
• Improving team productivity
• Identifying and developing leadership skills
• Practicing effective collaboration with team members

Types of team-building exercises

Team-building exercises consist of a variety of tasks designed to develop group members and their ability to work together effectively. There are many types of team building activities that range from games for kids to games and challenges that involve novel and complex tasks that are designed for improving group performance by addressing specific needs.

Team building can range from simple social activities - to encourage team members to spend time together- to team development activities -designed to help individuals discover how they approach a problem, how the team works together, and discover better methods of communication.

Team interaction involves "soft" interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation, leadership, and motivation - in contrast to technical skills directly involved with the job at hand. Depending on the type of team building, the novel tasks can encourage or specifically teach interpersonal team skills to increase team performance.

Whether indoor or outdoor, the purpose of team building exercises is to assist teams in becoming cohesive units of individuals that can effectively work together to complete tasks.

Communication exercise

This type of team building exercise is exactly what it sounds like. Communications exercises are problem solving activities that are geared towards improving communication skills. The issues teams encounter in these exercises are solved by communicating effectively with each other.

• Goal: Create an activity which highlights the importance of good communication in team performance and/or potential problems with communication.

Problem-solving/decision-making exercise

Problem-solving/decision-making exercises focus specifically on groups working together to solve difficult problems or make complex decisions. These exercises are some of the most common as they appear to have the most direct link to what employers want their teams to be able to do.

• Goal: Give team a problem in which the solution is not easily apparent or requires the team to come up with a creative solution

Planning/adaptability exercise

These exercises focus on aspects of planning and being adaptable to change. These are important things for teams to be able to do when they are assigned complex tasks or decisions. • Goal: Show the importance of planning before implementing a solution

Trust exercise

A trust exercise involves engaging team members in a way that will induce trust between them. They are sometimes difficult exercises to implement as there are varying degrees of trust between individuals and varying degrees of individual comfort trusting others in general.

• Goal: Create trust between team members

Organizational development

In the organizational development context, a team may embark on a process of self-assessment to gauge its effectiveness and improve its performance. To assess itself, a team seeks feedback from group members to find out both its current strengths and weakness.

To improve its current performance, feedback from the team assessment can be used to identify gaps between the desired state and the current state, and to design a gap-closure strategy. Team development can be the greater term containing this assessment and improvement actions, or as a component of organizational development.

Another way is to allow for personality assessment amongst the team members, so that they will have a better understanding of their working style, as well as their fellow team mates.

A structured team-building plan is a good tool to implement team bonding and thus, team awareness. These may be introduced by companies that specialize in executing team-building sessions, or done internally by the human resource department.

What does a team-building consultant do?

A team-building consultant, or coach, is responsible for each component of a team building event. He will likely interact with the team once, or for a limited number of times. During these first contacts, actively assessing the team, making recommendations, and providing activities (exercises that compose a team building intervention) for the team are the main responsibilities of the consultant. Moreover, usually a written proposal is required after the evaluation process, in which the trainer indicates how he or she would go about improving the team’s performance. Once the organization and consultant determine which recommendations to utilize (if not all), the consultant is then responsible for providing a useful intervention that will transfer back into the organizational setting. This responsibility usually requires the consultant to create a detailed plan of events, while allowing for flexibility. After the intervention has been employed, the consultant will typically evaluate the team-building program and communicate the results to the organization.

References

businessdictionary.com

See also

• Group development
• Team management
• Teamwork
• Organizational psychology
• Leadership development
• Personal development
• Office politics
• Maslow's Hierarchy