Some new thoughts on team building

Successful teams strike a balance between their personal characteristics and their technical competence.  Sporting teams are often more successful at achieving the required level of harmony than workplace teams.

To build a successful team requires astute attention to selection.  Sporting teams come together with the glue of competitive spirit and complementary skills.

If a sporting coach were to select an entire team of players who all wanted to be goal kickers, disaster would occur.  In a successful sporting team each member has a sphere of responsibility relevant to strengths and role.  All players have boundaries which if they cross, their effectiveness diminishes.

It’s the same with work teams.  The team is like a living, breathing life form.  It needs a control centre, an oxygen supply of creative ideas and arms and legs to get the ideas off the ground.

Effective team building requires good governance structures and clearly communicated goals.  All members need to know the rules of the game, have the skills to play and know in which direction they are travelling.

Just as individual team players have specific roles to play, a workplace team co-ordinator must depend on the dynamics within the team to run with the creative ball and drive it further forward towards the goal.

If the ball is dropped or the team member tackled, others must enter the scrum and continue forward.  The ultimate destination being achievement of the goal.

Mixed sporting metaphors aside, most business managers should grasp the analogy.  The team is not dependent on one player alone but on the collective contribution of all.

And a team comprised of members with identical skill sets and personal characteristics cannot achieve the desired goal. 

So make sure in your team selection process you have a creative type who will get the thought processes going.  He or she will need a couple of team members who have the expertise to get the project work rolling, with a key decision maker guiding the overall direction. 

You’ll also need a painful and pedantic type who will check everyone’s work and eliminate any errors before it moves higher up within the organisation.  And you’ll need a flashy presenter who will thrive on the pressure of getting the presentation ready for the Board of Directors (at which point other team mates are often exhausted/burnt out/totally over the project).

Depending on the hypothetical project, Board approval might bring about the natural demise of the team.  This is not a bad thing.  The team achieved its goal.  Some members might be retained within the production project team or an entirely new team might form.

All this is part of the natural life cycle of a team.  The complementary dynamics got them over the line.  They avoided the dangerous ‘group think’ mentality and the destructive in-fighting or anarchy that threatens highly focussed, diverse personalities.

With good governance, intelligent selection and the right motivation, the team has been successful.  Try applying the elite sporting team analogy to your next team building exercise.  You might be surprised how similarly they function.