Team Building Directory

Team Building

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."

Team building ingredients

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

* selection of participants
* establishing visions, goals, missions and/or objectives
* distribution of workload
* timetabling
* balancing skill-sets
* metrics
* harmonising personality types
* training on how to work together

The morale of the team, an important variable, may depend on such factors as:

* 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.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Team Building"