Team Building

What is Team Building?

The phrase “Team Building” usually refers to the process of identifying and selecting right
people, creating harmonious working groups, nurturing these groups and deriving a synergy
from their combined effort to produce the targeted results. Team building is practiced using a
range of processes, for example, group self-assessment and group-dynamic games. It is
essentially a part and parcel of the premise and process of Organizational Development.

From an organizational development perspective, when a group of co-workers adopts the

practices of self-assessment with an objective of measuring its own efficiency and thus improve
overall performance, it can be said to be involved in a team building exercise. However, from
academics point of view, a much broader definition would be required.

How it is achieved?

A typical team-building scenario involves:

- Clarifying the objectives, defining the role of each team member and communicating the
importance of their role to the concerned team members. This helps in building
responsibility, accountability and thus the ownership of the process.
- Identifying the negative elements to the teamwork and working on them to change their
perspective. Such elements may be removed if necessary and if that’s not possible, then
minimizing their negative impact on the team.
- Introducing tools that facilitate achievement of the team objectives. These tools can
include training programs to improve motivation level, increased awareness and
information availability, better resources, improved processes, etc.
- Using team-building tools (for example, performance management, 360 feedback etc.) in
the proper order to steadily improve performance.

To evaluate itself, a team tries to identify its current strengths and weaknesses. To achieve the
targeted objective, another exercise is undertaken to identify the gap between the present level
of performance and the desired level. Depending upon that, a strategy is formulated to close
this gap.

Why Team Building Fails?

The exercise of Team Building turns out to be futile many a times because of lack of common
objectives, making interventions out of sequence, poor assessment of the team, impractical
objectives and inability to distinguish between a group and a team.
Characteristics of Team Building

Team building is an exercise in which a team investigates its practices of working together and
attempts to create an atmosphere that supports and places importance on the contribution
made by each team member. Their energies are aimed at resolving the problems, task
efficiency, and optimizing all the resources to achieve the team's objective. Effective team
building acknowledges that performances of team members are interdependent.

Characteristics of sound Team building include:

1. There exists a high level of interdependence among team members. Every team member
has an important part to play in the success of the team. Teamwork is thus a critical factor for
overall achievement of the team objectives. Individual’s success might not be enough to
produce the desired results.

2. Leadership skills of the team leader. The team leader should have excellent interpersonal
skills and should strive for creating and nurturing a teamwork culture in the organization. It is
also the responsibility of the team leader to identify and develop future leaders.

3. All the team members share a common vision and are equipped with necessary knowledge,
ability, and experience that they are ready to share for the team’s success.

4. Work environment is supportive, open and relaxed.

5. All the team members have a trust and respect for each other and their capabilities. Every
team member’s opinion is given a due regard at meetings and the leadership is open to
accepting and implementing suggestions from anybody in the team.

6. The team, leadership and individual look for and support innovation. A reward system is in
place to encourage creativity and new ideas.

7. The team goals are well defined, challenging and practical.

8. Every member knows his/her role, responsibility and importance in the overall
organizational plan. Communication is unambiguous and there are defined procedures for
resolving problems.

9. Personal attacks and criticism are avoided and there is sharing of experiences to improve
the learning process in case of failures.

10. Frequent performance evaluations ensure that the team is on the right track.
Roles of A Team Leader

For a better coordination among the team members, establishing good communication with the
organization and for effective functioning of the team, a team leader is required. A team leader
is not just another team member but his role is rather very demanding in the sense that he/she
needs to provide the structure and necessary help to all the team members but also has to be a
team member as well. Therefore, his/her role needs a special focus.

Briefly, a team leader performs four most important and crucial functions with respect to the
team. These are:

Guiding

The leader provides the platform for the discussions, planning and action to carry out.

Motivation

Motivation involves strengthening productive team efforts. The team leader examines the
feedback and ensures that all team members are enthusiastically involved in the development.

Coaching

This involves providing right kind of feedback to the team members and helping them in
improving their performances. This could be in sessions involving just the concerned individual
or in-group, as required by the situation. In such sessions, team members can share their
problems with their leader and leader provides them helpful support to resolve the problem.
Their role also requires them to bring out any conflicts and find a constructive solution to those
rather than suppressing them.

Harmonizing

Harmonizing involves better coordination among the team members. With improved
communication and feedback, the leader facilitates improved work environment, monitors
performance, provides useful inputs and brings the entire team together as one cohesive unit.

A successful team leader has a higher emotional quotient, possesses excellent interpersonal
skills and experienced in dealing with people’s emotions with a rational approach to efficient
problem solving. Other most important functions of the team leader are: bringing together
persons who can be highly productive, bringing transparency to goals, creating an atmosphere
that is encouraging as well as confronting, making certain that work procedures are rewarding
and efficient, and building an environment that supports and allows for the discussion and free
flow of communication on the relevant issues.
Team Building Activities

Why Team Activities

During team meetings, it is important that every team member knows the other people around.
A good understanding of each other helps in better teamwork. The main objective of Team
building activities is to create a fun filled interaction among the coworkers that helps them
know each other as persons and not just as professionals. The resulting informal atmosphere
creates the ground for team work where individuals are more human beings, willing to help
each other and lesser of professionals with steely nerves.

During the start or beginning of the team sessions or meetings, one very popular activity is used
that is called Icebreakers (also called Warm-ups, Energizers or Openers) that helps people feel
more relaxed and they introduce themselves with others. Icebreakers are most effective when
they are enjoyable and are able to hold particularly, when they provide an opportunity to know
the qualities of the team members that aren't known to others (for example, hidden talents).
Knowing each other in a fun filled atmosphere and in an informal manner can not just help in
reducing stress and nervousness but also helps participants get a feeling of the shared traits
with other team members.

Example of Team Activities

Would You Rather: Here, all the participants are asked to answer questions like given below-

Would you rather…

- Prefer being invisible or have the ability to read others’ thoughts?

- Have hair all over your body or be totally bald?
- Be happy for 8hrs/day and poor or sad for 8hr/day and rich?
- Prefer to be the most admired or the smartest individual?
- Live without TV or fast food for remaining part of your life?
- Be in news for saving someone’s life or getting Nobel Prize?

More funny questions can be added and asking for reasons for participants’ answers can further
add to the fun spirits.

Other Team Activities

There are many other games and activities which can be introduced to create a team spirit
among the members for example- Name games, Party games, Collaboration-suitable for large
teams, Team strategy, Table games, Tag games, Rhythm games etc. are used to achieve the team
building objectives. Depending upon the team size, different types of activities can be
introduced to make the sessions lively.
There are many more types of team building activities that we can introduce such as
Outdoor/Indoor recreation, seminars, social gatherings, social service, changes in performance
system, individual training etc.

Evaluating Team Development

To support the team leader in appraising the status of team development, each team member
should be asked to answer the following questions as given in the questionnaire.
Subsequently, there should be an open discussion to ascertain the situation and changes
required to further improve the teamwork.
Rating Team Development

How do you feel about your team's progress? (Check the rating)

A. Team's Objectives
---- I'm unsure 1 2 3 4 5 ---- I'm clear
B. Team meetings
---- I'm excluded 1 2 3 4 5 ---- I'm included
C. Discussions, communication and information sharing
---- Very guarded 1 2 3 4 5 ---- Very open
D. Team goals
---- Set by seniors 1 2 3 4 5 ---- Set during team interaction
E. Use of team member's capabilities and abilities
---- Ineffective use 1 2 3 4 5 ---- Good use
F. Support
---- Little support to team members-- 1 2 3 4 5 ---- High level of support for team members

G. Conflict
---- Problematic issues are usually avoided 1 2 3 4 5 ---- All such issues discussed frankly and
directly
H. Influence on decisions
---- Only selected members 1 2 3 4 5 ---- Any body can influence the decisions
I. Risk taking
---- Not Allowed 1 2 3 4 5 ---- Lots of support
J. Working on relationships with others
--- Little effort 1 2 3 4 5 --- High level of effort
K. Distribution of leadership
--- Restricted 1 2 3 4 5 --- Shared among all the team members
L. Performance feedback
--- Negligible 1 2 3 4 5 --- Considerable
As team members develop a loyalty, faith, respect and support for each other, it will help them
in developing and achieving the targeted results. This dedication, faith, and independence by
each team member are important in achieving a consistently high performance. Team
performance can be better appraised if the team develops a benchmark against which to
evaluate its performance.