Building successful teams
Successful teams take time and effort to build. They take more effort and energy to maintain and support. Building successful teams is an objective of every organisation and department. When a team is successfully built, it easily meets its targets and works well together. The process of building a team is a daunting and difficult exercise but the results thereafter are pleasing and profitable. Some of the best teams are found in the army and high risk occupations.
To build a successful team, the following steps need to be taken;
Align around shared goals and objectives
Build effective working relationships
Reduce team members’ role ambiguity
Find common solutions to the teams’ problems
In building a successful team, there are four approaches that one can adopt.
The first one is setting goals. This emphasizes the importance of clear objectives and individual and team goals. Team members become involved in action planning to identify ways to define success and failure and achieve goals. This is intended to strengthen motivation and foster a sense of ownership. By identifying specific outcomes and tests of incremental success, teams can measure their progress.
The second approach is that of role clarification. This stresses the importance of having clearly defined roles and responsibilities. It emphasizes improving team members' understanding of their own and others' respective roles and duties. This is intended to reduce ambiguity and foster understanding of the importance of structure by activities aimed at defining and adjusting roles. It emphasizes the members' interdependence and the value of having each member focus on their own role in the team's success.
The third approach in building successful teams is problem solving. Every team has internal problems. Some may be trivial while others could have serious consequences on the team’s activities. Problem solving emphasizes identifying major problems within the team and working together to find solutions. This can have the added benefit of enhancing critical-thinking.
The fourth and final approach of team building is fostering and nurturing interpersonal relations. a unified and supportive team is connected through strong interpersonal relations. These relations emphasize increasing teamwork skills such as giving and receiving support, communication and sharing. Teams with fewer interpersonal conflicts generally function more effectively than others. A facilitator guides the conversations to develop mutual trust and open communication between team members.
Successful teams are effective at what they do. The effectiveness of team building differs substantially from one organization to another. The most effective efforts occur when team members are interdependent, knowledgeable and experienced and when organizational leadership actively establishes and supports the team.
Effective team building incorporates an awareness of team objectives. Teams must work to develop goals, roles and procedures. As a result, team building is usually associated with increasing task accomplishment, goal meeting, and achievement of results within teams.
There are challenges to team building. Some notable challenges of team building are;
Lack of teamwork skills
Virtual workplaces that hinder physical interaction and bonding
Ineffective communication
Team building is a critical skill that can be applied in schools, organisations sports and community activities. Given the obstacles and challenges to building an effective and successful teams, team leaders need to work extra hard to bridge individualism to collectivism and unify the team. in addition, team management and group development ideas need to be applied to keep the team together.
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