Team Building – Putting up an Effective Working Team
Before going into team building, we should understand what a team is. A team is a group of people who have been brought together to perform various activities that enable them to collectively perform a certain project or task.
Team building is often confused for the entertainment activities that many organizations hold for their employees. Though these are termed team building activities, these do not in any form contribute towards effective building up of a team.
So, what does it take to effectively build teams that can work together as a strong force in the achievement of tasks or projects that are allocated to it?
The main component of any team is the team leader. If the team leader has strong leadership skills, then the members in the team can be carefully selected and utilized for their strong expertise in the required area to get the work completed. So, the first person you need to have on the team is a good team leader.
This team leader need not be automatically a person who has more experience than the others employees but should have strong skill sets to be a leader of the group. If such a person is not found among your employees, you should not hesitate to select one from outside the pool to get an effective team in place.
Once the team leader has been selected, he/she should be responsible for the proper selection of the team. The team members should comprise of people who are exactly suited for the different skills that are necessary to complete the project. For this reason, the team leader should have a thorough knowledge about what to look for by being briefed about the project beforehand.
By a careful selection process, the team members should be selected and every team member should be properly made aware of what is expected of them and where their strengths will be put to good use. Any weakness of the individual team member should be known to the team leader and this weakness should be adequately covered by the strength of other team members.
All the team members should be aware of what is happening with the project and should have a clear vision about what they are working towards. The line of communication between the team leader and the team members should be open at all times and the leader should be aware of what is happening.
The team leader should work towards building trust and good rapport with the team members and this will come out of working along with the team and not with bossing over the team and trying to act pricey and making decisions without informing the team. The team should receive credit for the work done and the team leader should not take any individual credit for the work done as this is a huge trust breaker.
The team leader is the team player that holds or breaks a team and gets to work with all the team members realizing their strengths and putting it to good use for the project to get completed smoothly. While the team leader is an important person, the team players too form an important integral part of the team without which none of the activities can get completed. There is no team leader if there is no team!