Active Team Building

Team building uses activities to help build a better team spirit, which leads to better team coordination and therefore better efficiency and productivity.

Team building activities tend to fall into two groups: active team building, which tends to be the more physical hands-on kind of activities, and mental team building, which tends to concentrate more on thought activities, often using specialised computer programs.

Both kinds of activities use a certain amount of mental problem solving and it could be argued that the mental activities are really all that is required to solve any problem. However, building up a team using a combination of mental problem solving and physical adjusting to find the right answer can work out best in most cases.

An effective team is not just a group of people. It is a group of people who are coordinated and cohesive, and who have a common shared goal. There may also be individual goals for individual members that progress towards the overall team goal.

Each member of a team should understand why they are in the team. They should understand their requirement and usefulness in the team, and they should have commitment to achieving the team goals.

A team starts to fall apart and become unproductive when there is a loss of general direction. If individual members feel undervalued, or if they are confused about their role within the team, then they cannot perform at their most efficient.

Commitment and engagement through being made to feel valued and being made to feel a necessary part of the overall structure of the team is an essential part of active team building.

The actual activities used in building a team are really less important in and of themselves than they are sometimes made out to be. The real value can often lie in the natural interaction between team members that tales place as a result of the activity. This can be quite different from the interaction that happens in the workplace.

In a work environment there is always a hierarchy that can place a certain restraint on workers. This can actually inhibit the very team spirit that is so eagerly sought on company away days. The "them and us" mentality that most workers have, which is usually imposed on the workers, can restrict spontaneous action and lead to a stifling of natural response.

Active team building on company away days presents a quite different situation. The worker and boss relationship tends to break down to some degree. The lowly worker doesn't feel so lowly, and therefore tends to come out of his or her shell more. The boss tends to relax more and become more human and approachable. In short, both sides of the team move closer to each other.

Something else tends to happen too. Because of the more relaxed atmosphere on company away days, each individual starts to notice certain traits and habits about the others that they probably have not noticed before. They start to learn how the others think and how they prefer to work in certain circumstances. This natural learning process is usually quite subliminal, but it is there nonetheless. This, more than anything else, can be the real value of active team building.