As many organizational cultures are becoming less hierarchical and bureaucratic, in keeping with the knowledge and information age, the need for teams keeps growing. This means that the capacity of an organization to build and utilize teams can provide a major competitive advantage. This is why real teams may be the best tool modern organizations have for upping performance. More than any other organizational structure, effective teams offer the flexibility and power to respond quickly to change.
What is a True Team?
Teams have been defined as a small group of people with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and specific performance goals. The work of real teams requires collaboration and interdependence among team members. This means the leadership role will shift among team members. Contrast this with working groups, in which work is a sum of individual contributions and the tasks aren’t really interdependent. Such groups usually have one permanent leader, and tasks are performed in series (as in an assembly line) rather than in parallel.
It’s important to note that calling a team a team doesn’t make it one. Most teams are really working groups that are lacking the strategy, structure, processes, and organizational support to increase performance. Worse still are committees, boards, and compromise/consensus gatherings that pose as teams. These kinds of ineffective groups tend to fill organizations that force-fit teams into settings and situations where they simply don’t belong.
What is Team Building?
The most important thing to remember about team building is that it’s an involved, multifaceted, long-term process. In other words, it’s a program, not a one-shot tactic or event. It is an unfortunate, and generally unacknowledged, fact that so-called team building events don’t actually improve team performance—unless they’re part of an ongoing team development strategy.
Another critical point is that true teams require performance-based assessment. And the performance-improvement measures must be clear, compelling, and outcome- rather than activity-based.
The bottom line is that team building takes time. A group can only become a team through sustained, disciplined action. In order for teams to pay off, the organization needs to support team development on an ongoing basis.
Our Team Building Approach
We use a functional team building approach, which focuses on the transferability of performance gains to the work setting. The endgame always is to improve team effectiveness in specific, quantifiable ways, which requires that: A) baseline performance is measured along several dimensions; B) performance is reassessed at some future point to gauge progress; and C) the performance measures relate to actual work the team does, i.e., they are functional metrics.
Our team building programs help improve performance by strengthening one or more of the following team success factors:
Some of these factors are best addressed in offsite events. Others require team development in the work setting. Our goal is to leverage each client’s investment by determining the most impactful area(s) to develop first.