Team Building

Team Building Basics
A Guide to Getting Going in the World of Team Building

What Does Your Team Look Like?

Team Building Basics

A team is a group of people who come together temporarily to achieve a purpose.  There is no magic formula for "building a team".  Teams are organic - they grow and change - but you can study how teams work and this affords you greater capability in helping a team learn how to work effectively.

Getting Going with Team Building

• Animals and plants gather together in groups and work together in order to help each other (and ultimately themselves) to reach goals that would have been out of reach for a single individual. 
• Humans, in this sense, are no different.  We are gregarious (social) creatures and many of our goals and motivations require us to work closely together with other people.
• The word 'team' derives from the use of oxen or bullocks shackled together to create a focused, shared force for transporting heavy materials.
• A team is a group of people who come together temporarily to achieve a purpose.
• There is no magic formula for "building a team".
• Teams are organic and involve chemistry - they grow and change - so you need to make use of the opportunities that change offers when it comes to facilitating team development.
• Team building is not easy, but there are a lot of techniques, principles and methods that can be applied and which can really make a difference e.g.,
  • stages of group development
  • group dynamics
  • psychological profiling
  • team building activities
• Team building is tied to personal development -- team development requires members individual team members to grow and develop -- as an individual's personal growth unfolds, so too does their capacity to participate in and thrive in group situations.
• The closer the correspondence between team goals and individual goals, the greater the sum of individual motivations for succeeding together.  (Check out Field Theory by Kurt Lewin, also Buckminster Fuller)
• Group dynamics are the unseen psycho-social forces that operate amongst groups of people.  Team dynamics are the cocktail of interpersonal chemistry which, if effectively harnessed, can provide considerable power for reaching collective goals.
• Group dynamics can be brazenly characterised as explosively positive, dull/neutral, or explosively negative.  So watch out if you're going to tinker with groups -- anything can and usually does happen.  The more experience you have the better, but experience is no cause for complacency or conceit, since every group situation is unique.