Team building

From ArticleWorld

Team building is the process of creating trust and cooperation between team members. This involves interactive exercises and discussions in order to foster teamwork. Team building may be applied to the work environment as well as to sports and other recreational activities.

Necessity for team building

The fast pace of the circumstances we experience necessitates team building to achieve our objectives. In the modern world things are very fast-paced. Situations are always being altered both in the workplace and on a personal level. This effectively means that many groups of people are expected to interact and get along while moving towards the achievement of a common goal. This type of interaction in short spaces of time is often considered unnatural, as it is the tendency of humans to evolve to work in static environments. This is a major reason it has become necessary for methods to assist in team building.

Team building ingredients

The most important feature of a successful team is high morale. In building a team it is necessary to select participants, establish objectives, distribute workload, provide training on how to work together and a variety of other factors. One key component of a successful team is its ability to keep its morale high. Morale is often reliant on factors such as support, resources, communication and the personalities being involved.

Organizational development

Team building may be applied more specifically to organizational development in terms of self-assessment. Although self-assessment can be termed as engaging in team building, this is a narrow definition. The process of self-assessment assists an organization to determine its effectiveness and thereby improve its performance. The team seeks feedback and determines strengths and weaknesses in order to identify gaps and design measures to deal with those gaps.

With increases in workforce volume, more and more there is a need to continually create and maintain a mindset of teamwork. This task is very complex, as there is no longer the intimacy of small groups and potential for dissension are more frequent. New, innovative methods are now required for team building as it is seen that older methods of team management no longer work.