Whether you’re an organization or a professional responsible for facilitating a team or group’s team-building process, the following tips are guaranteed to give you some fresh ideas on how to accelerate your team-building initiatives:
1. Create a common vision
A common vision for all team members is essential for team building and organizational success. Spend time visualizing as a team: what you want to create and where you want to go. This viewing time should also allow you to celebrate your current successes!
Ask yourself: How clear is our vision? Do all team members have the same vision?
2. Develop common goals
Make sure all team members understand and support the goals of your organization / project and program. All team members need to understand how their efforts are contributing to the larger goals.
Ask yourself: Do all team members know what role they play in supporting our broader organizational / team goals? Is everyone clear about what those goals are?
3. Clarify roles and responsibilities
One of the main challenges for organizations and groups to move towards where they really want to be is due to a lack of clarity about individual roles and responsibilities. Clarifying these roles can help support and achieve your common vision and goals.
Ask yourself, “How clear are our staff in understanding their specific roles? Their specific responsibilities? Where do roles and responsibilities overlap among individual team members? Where do roles and responsibilities overlap with other departments?
4. Secure management support
Supervisors and managers play a key role in “keeping learning alive.” Make sure supervisors, managers and owners are following up with staff on what their needs are and how team building efforts can be improved. Managers also play a key role in ensuring that learning from team building initiatives is brought back to the office.
Ask yourself: What systems do we currently have to ensure that learning is sustained? Can we discuss this in staff meetings? Do we have a coaching program?
5. Use attractive exercises
Team building can be fun and challenging as it helps teams reach their full potential. Make sure participants are engaged and challenged throughout the process. Consider hiring an experienced external facilitator to support your efforts and even run a training of trainers program with your staff.
Ask yourself: What types of activities or exercises would work best for our team members? What are the issues of relevance to them?
6. Get him out of the office
Conducting team building sessions in the office can be disruptive and distracting. The appeal of email, voicemail, and urgent items often takes precedence over the experience of an entire team in the office. Reduce daily distractions by conducting team building sessions outside of the office.
Ask yourself: What kind of environment would our team of staff benefit from? Some organizations prefer a more “corporate” formal team building session, while others embrace nature and the great outdoors.
7. Create an action plan
Create an action plan to make team building part of your job or daily life. Retreat days or team building programs often have few ties to day-to-day business or organizational goals. Make sure that, when designing the program, you create links with the organization or with everyday life so that participants can “take the learning home”. This can be done by building formal action planning time into the schedule and having managers follow up during regular staff meetings. Coaching can be used to keep the “learning alive” after team building events. Find out if individual, team, or group coaching will work best for your organization.
Ask yourself: What can we do to support and maintain individual and team action planning? What current systems do we have for reviewing action plans? Some examples may include staff meetings, manager registrations, internal / external coaching.
8. Take time to learn what your team members need.
Creating a group or organizational context where communication is open and individual team members feel comfortable mentioning their needs will make teamwork efforts more focused and productive.
Find out exactly what team members are looking for to improve their work and efforts before the team building event. This can be done by the facilitator and / or the team building committee, through email questionnaires, focus groups or individual meetings.
One of the most common mistakes made by team building initiatives is that it doesn’t fit the needs of the team. Make sure you spend enough time before the event itself to assess what the team members really want.
Ask yourself: What are the top three priorities for our team members? What’s the best way to find out from individual members?
9. Keep it regular
Once a year, team building programs can do a lot to boost morale in the short term, but ask yourself, “What would it be like if we did something more often?” Imagine the results!
Using the same facilitator in successive programs can often give the event an added boost. The confidence and understanding of the team is usually higher in each successive event, when the same facilitator is used.
Ask yourself: How much time can we spend on team-building efforts in our organization this year? How will that look like?
10. Have fun!
Most importantly, team building initiatives should be fun and engaging for all staff members. They must be relevant and meaningful to the team. Design with the facilitator (s) what structure and themes will give your team the most influence.
Ask yourself: What would fun be like for us, given our organizational culture and philosophy?
Look to integrate some of these ideas and systems into your next team-building initiative, be it a retreat, team training, or workshop, to build a more extraordinary, sustained, and productive team.
Copyright 2007 – Jennifer Britton. All rights reserved.
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