TEAM BUILDING

"Team building" (or "'teambuilding'") refers to the process of establishing and developing a greater sense of collaboration and trust between team members. Interactive exercises, team assessments, and group discussions enable groups to cultivate this greater sense of teamwork. Team building is used in many contexts, for example in sport clubs and work organizations.

Section 1.01                       Need for team building

Modern society and culture continues to become more fluid and dynamic. Factors contributing to this include the communications revolution, the global market and the ever-increasing specialization and division of labor. The net effect is that individuals are now required to work with many different groups of people in their professional as well as personal lives. Joining a new group and immediately being expected to get along with them is somewhat unnatural - historically humans have worked and lived in close-knit, static societies. As such, people have had to develop methods to help people adapt to the new requirements. All kinds of people, from investment bankers to catering staff and session musicians, face the same difficulties. As yet there is no generally agreed solution to the problem - it may not even be possible given the thousands of years of cultural evolution that brought us to our present behavior patterns.

Team building ingredients

Ingredients seen as important to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts include:

1.       selection of participants

2.       establishing visions, goals, missions and/or objectives

3.       distribution of workload

4.       timetabling

5.       balancing skill-sets

6.       allocation of roles within the team

7.       metrics

8.       harmonising personality types

9.       training on how to work together

The factors influencing morale of the team

• support
• resources
• communication
• personalities

As team performance reflects on management, managers -- and even coaches -- sometimes feel the need to take part in constructing and fostering teams.

Section 1.02                       Team building in organizational development

The term 'team building' can refer generally to the selection and motivation of teams, or more specifically to group self-assessment in the theory and practice of organizational development.

When a team in an organizational development context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it can be argued that it is engaging in team building, although this may be considered a narrow definition.

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• its current strengths as a team
• its current weaknesses

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• design a gap-closure strategy

As teams grow larger, the skills and methods managers must use to create or maintain a spirit of teamwork change. The intimacy of a small group is lost, and the opportunity for misinformation and disruptive rumors grows. Managers find that communication methods that once worked well are impractical with so many people to lead. In particular, leaders encounter difficulties based on Daglow's Law of Team Dynamics: "Small teams are informed. Big teams infer."

Section 1.03                       Steps for improving team performance

This series of articles describes a performance management system for teams: a systematic process for changing team behaviours in a way that leads directly to increased performance and business benefits.

At the core of the process is the principle that team performance can be improved using the following basic steps:

1 Identify your behavioural goals
This might include canvassing opinion from the team, customers, management, staff, peers and others on what behaviours will lead to team success

2 Measure your current behaviours
Assess your team's current behaviours using the same behavioural framework as that in step 1, to enable direct comparisons

3 Undertake a gap analysis
Identify the most significant gaps between target/current behaviours

4 Close the gap
Design a programme of training or a series of team actions that will change the team's behaviour

5 Monitor
This includes monitoring of the programme of improvement, remeasuring 'current behaviours' to make sure they are making progress towards the behavioural goals, and taking corrective action when insufficient progress is being made.

(a)   Requisite for the team

A preliminary step in this performance management system is to define the team. A team definition consists of:

• A description of the common goal towards which the team is working
  That is, what is the goal to which the whole team are working, and cannot be achieved without the whole team.
• A list of people who are members of the team (ie who share responsibility in achieving the common goal).
•  Team is only a functional group - a collection of individuals who are assembled together within the company hierarchy for organisational convenience.
• To check what is the common goal towards which the team is working.
• It is appropriate to use this performance management system in the group.
• Alternatively, they should be aware of their shared goal. In that situation, producing the team definition will help to make them aware of the team goal.
• Identifying who are the people primarily responsible for achieving the common goal without difficulty.
•  Teams have clear boundaries and the membership is clear and discrete. However, there can sometimes be a small 'core team' whose primary focus is the team goal, but a much larger 'extended team', with a very broad and distributed membership, who have other teams to which they contribute.
• Team nonetheless, with shared responsibility for achieving a common goal. This performance management system is still relevant and of potential use.