Do you want excellent teamwork?
Many people like murder mysteries, wilderness adventures or a ropes course, but you’re smart enough to know that this will not improve your team’s performance. You need structural improvement and this can’t be done by playing games. Many so-called team building activities are superficial and are once-only events. They don’t help when you want to drastically improve team collaboration, and you know that collaboration is the key to high performance.
It’s never been easy to build a great team, but it has become increasingly difficult. The way teams are built has been changing faster than ever. Each task requires a specialized team which is also cross-functional and global. Time-to-market has become shorter, deadlines have become difficult to meet and tasks have become more complex. These challenging conditions make the team’s success even more dependent on good teamwork. You have to invest in team leadership and you have to know how to build and maintain a successful team.
First the foundations, then team building
Many corporate team building activities are a waste of time, money and energy, not only because they are often superficial games, but also because the team’s foundations are not yet strong enough. You can recognize a strong foundation by:
- a good design
- the right team composition
Good design consists of clear goals, roles, tasks and responsibilities. Some tasks are “mission impossible” from the very start. If the goal is unattainable or is explained in different ways, you can’t count on good collaboration. You know very well that a teambuilding activity won’t change anything about this.
Of course you also know that it’s important to compose a team carefully. Only with the right knowledge, experience, expertise and diversity can you achieve great accomplishments. Teambuilding can never solve poor team members selection.
Only if the design is right and when the right people have been brought together, can you invest in teambuilding. The team leader helps the team work together quickly and in a positive way in difficult circumstance while he/she takes advantage as much a possible of the team’s diversity and differences. Team leaders who make a great investment in team building, either by providing training themselves or in the form of team training, will immediately notice this by the results and atmosphere in the team. The greater their mutual dependence, the higher the return on investment of teambuilding will be.
Teambuilding: investment in individuals and the team
Teambuilding means investing in:
- People skills
- What am I doing here? What are you doing here?
- Collaboration
- Looking further than your own plate
Ad. 1 People skills
Most of the time, team building reminds us of immediate investment in collaboration, in building trust and team development. We have noticed that it is often more valuable to first, or also, invest in individual team member skills. Many employees have limited team skills. They often still have to experience what it is like to work well in a team and how they can personally contribute to this in the best way. They could learn how a team works, how to deal with their own strengths and weaknesses and how a team makes decisions. When team skills are lacking at an individual level, a team will never be able to perform at a high level.
Ad. 2 What am I doing here? What are you doing here?
In this phase, the team learns more about goals, roles and the tasks of the team members: what is the goal and what will everyone’s contribution to this be? The team will of course also learn that team members are not solely responsible for their own tasks, but also for the results of the entire team. It sometimes seems obvious what the team will be doing and how you will be doing this together. However, everyone has their own idea of the role of the team leader and those ideas can be quite different. During a team building activity we always make sure that ideas about teamwork are exchanged and that all team members are on the same wavelength.
Ad. 3 Investing in collaboration
It is also important to focus your investment on communication and collaboration. Team members learn useful and smart ways to accomplish a task together, to make decisions, solve problems, while making maximum use of each other’s qualities and expertise.
Ad. 4 Looking further than your own plate
In the end, team building is also about shaping relations with the team and its environment, for example, with other departments in the organization, a manager, or customer. Sooner or later, each team member will play a part in this and it is necessary to have mutual agreement on this.
