Prioritizing team building efforts can help in the team developmental process. Team building is an ongoing process that helps a work group evolve into a cohesive unit. The team members not only share expectations for accomplishing group tasks, but trust and support one another and respect one another’s individual differences. Your role as a team builder is to lead your team toward cohesiveness and productivity. A team takes on a life of its own and you have to regularly nurture and maintain it, just as you do for individual employees.
With good team-building skills, you can unite employees around a common goal and generate greater productivity. Without them, you limit yourself and the staff to the effort each individual can make alone.
Team building can lead to:
- Good communications with participants as team members and individuals
- Increased department productivity and creativity
- Team members motivated to achieve goals
- A climate of cooperation and collaborative problem-solving
- Higher levels of job satisfaction and commitment
- Higher levels of trust and support
- Diverse co-workers working well together
- Clear work objectives
- Better operating policies and procedures
Symptoms that Signal a Need for Team Building
- Decreased productivity
- Conflicts or hostility among staff members
- Confusion about assignments, missed signals, and unclear relationships
- Decisions misunderstood or not carried through properly
- Apathy and lack of involvement
- Lack of initiation, imagination, innovation; routine actions taken for solving complex problems
- Complaints of discrimination or favoritism
- Ineffective staff meetings, low participation, minimally effective decisions
- Negative reactions to the manager
- Complaints about quality of service
Teamwork
The first rule of team building is an obvious one: to lead a team effectively, you must first establish your leadership with each team member. Remember that the most effective team leaders build their relationships of trust and loyalty, rather than fear or the power of their positions. Prioritizing team building activities contributes to team developmental process and achieving teamwork.