Team Building Definition

A team building definition could be: a group of people who improve their individual and collective performances through a process designed to bring this about. The definition needs to further state that the group of people need to have shared or common goals, which are usually the goals of the company they work for.

Building a team achieves this in many ways. One of the first things to tackle is the removal of anything that is inhibiting or blocking the attainment of the shared goals. There are many possible things that could have this effect. It could be the team member who doesn't feel valued, or who doesn't understand his or her role in the team. Or it could even be a boss or manager who is too repressive and who doesn't allow freedom of movement and thought.

Once all the things that inhibit and block the process of building a team are removed it becomes necessary to introduce ways and methods of enabling the process of achieving the shared goals. Individual team members often think that because they are committed to their own individual goals, they are also committed to the greater company shared goals. That is not usually the case.

Enabling the process of achieving the common and shared company goals involves individual awareness of the fact that, while each member does have their own personal goals, they also have the greater overall goals too. If they can be persuaded to become committed to both sets of goals, the process of building a team is then well underway.

A team building definition that is definitely wrong is the assumption that a group of people who work together are a team. This may be so, but it may also not be so. A team needs to be a cohesive unit with commitment to a common shared goal or set of goals. For this reason, some of the common activities used on company away days fail to build a proper team.

All too often providers of team building centres think that the competitive approach is the right one to take. It usually is not. This is exacerbated by the fact that they all too often mistake assertiveness with aggression, which usually only confuses those involved.

The competitive approach should be turned into a cooperative approach. It is pointless to pit members of the same team against each other, or to split a team and pitch one half against the other. A much better approach is to force team members to cooperate. If they have to get along together in order to achieve a goal where no one person is a winner, but all of those involved are joint winners, the team building definition is better served.

Even the "common enemy" type of activity goes against the best definition. It can certainly give individual team members that sense of sharing a common goal, of all being in the same boat, so to speak, but it fails to create value. It only creates a sense that beating the enemy is all important when it really is not. The team building definition requires tasks that draw people together in a way that allows them to conquer that which is bigger than any of them, utilise the abilities of all of them, but does not allow any of them to be able to claim personal victory.