TEAM BUILDING SKILLS IN INTERNATIONAL CORPORATE ---- LIVIU SIMA----4

pagini

“Talents wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins

champions”

M. Jordan

With good team-building skills, you can unite employees around a common goal and
generate greater productivity. Without them, you limit yourself and the staff to the effort each
individual can make alone.

Team building is an ongoing process that helps a work group evolve into a cohesive unit.
The team members not only share expectations for accomplishing group tasks, but trust
and support one another and respect one another's individual differences. Your role as a team
builder is to lead your team toward cohesiveness and productivity. A team takes on a life of its
own and you have to regularly nurture and maintain it, just as you do for individual employees.

Team building can lead to:

* Good communications with participants as team members and individuals

* Increased department productivity and creativity
* Team members motivated to achieve goals
* A climate of cooperation and collaborative problem-solving
* Higher levels of job satisfaction and commitment
* Higher levels of trust and support
* Diverse co-workers working well together
* Clear work objectives
* Better operating policies and procedures.

Steps to Building an Effective Team

The first rule of team building is an obvious one: to lead a team effectively, you must first
establish your leadership with each team member. Remember that the most effective team
leaders build their relationships of trust and loyalty, rather than fear or the power of their
positions.

* Consider each employee's ideas as valuable. Remember that there is no such thing as a
stupid idea.
 * Be aware of employees' unspoken feelings. Set an example to team members by being open
with employees and sensitive to their moods and feelings.
* Act as a harmonizing influence. Look for chances to mediate and resolve minor disputes;
point continually toward the team's higher goals.
* Be clear when communicating. Be careful to clarify directives.
* Encourage trust and cooperation among employees on your team. Remember that the
relationships team members establish among themselves are every bit as important as those you
establish with them. As the team begins to take shape, pay close attention to the ways in which
team members work together and take steps to improve communication, cooperation, trust, and
respect in those relationships.
* Encourage team members to share information. Emphasize the importance of each team
member's contribution and demonstrate how all of their jobs operate together to move the entire
team closer to its goal.
* Delegate problem-solving tasks to the team. Let the team work on creative solutions
together.
* Facilitate communication. Remember that communication is the single most important factor
in successful teamwork. Facilitating communication does not mean holding meetings all the
time. Instead it means setting an example by remaining open to suggestions and concerns, by
asking questions and offering help, and by doing everything you can to avoid confusion in your
own communication.
* Establish team values and goals; evaluate team performance. Be sure to talk with members
about the progress they are making toward established goals so that employees get a sense both
of their success and of the challenges that lie ahead. Address teamwork in performance
standards. Discuss with your team:
o What do we really care about in performing our job?
o What does the word success mean to this team?
o What actions can we take to live up to our stated values?
* Make sure that you have a clear idea of what you need to accomplish; that you know what
your standards for success are going to be; that you have established clear time frames; and that
team members understand their responsibilities.
* Use consensus. Set objectives, solve problems, and plan for action. While it takes much
longer to establish consensus, this method ultimately provides better decisions and greater
productivity because it secures every employee's commitment to all phases of the work.
* Set ground rules for the team. These are the norms that you and the team establish to ensure
efficiency and success. They can be simple directives (Team members are to be punctual for
meetings) or general guidelines (Every team member has the right to offer ideas and
suggestions), but you should make sure that the team creates these ground rules by consensus
and commits to them, both as a group and as individuals.
* Establish a method for arriving at a consensus. You may want to conduct open debate about
the pros and cons of proposals, or establish research committees to investigate issues and deliver
reports.
* Encourage listening and brainstorming. As supervisor, your first priority in creating
consensus is to stimulate debate. Remember that employees are often afraid to disagree with one
another and that this fear can lead your team to make mediocre decisions. When you encourage
debate you inspire creativity and that's how you'll spur your team on to better results.
* Establish the parameters of consensus-building sessions. Be sensitive to the frustration that
can mount when the team is not achieving consensus. At the outset of your meeting, establish
time limits, and work with the team to achieve consensus within those parameters. Watch out for
false consensus; if an agreement is struck too quickly, be careful to probe individual team
members to discover their real feelings about the proposed solution.

Symptoms that Signal a Need for Team Building

# Decreased productivity
# Conflicts or hostility among staff members
# Confusion about assignments, missed signals, and unclear relationships
# Decisions misunderstood or not carried through properly
# Apathy and lack of involvement
# Lack of initiation, imagination, innovation; routine actions taken for solving complex problems
# Complaints of discrimination or favoritism
# Ineffective staff meetings, low participation, minimally effective decisions
# Negative reactions to the manager
# Complaints about quality of service .

Team building skills are critical for your effectiveness as a manager or entrepreneur. And
even if you are not in a management or leadership role yet, better understanding of team work
can make you a more effective employee and give you an extra edge in your corporate office.

A team building success is when your team can accomplish something much bigger and
work more effectively than a group of the same individuals working on their own. You have a
strong synergy of individual contributions. But there are two critical factors in building a high
performance team.

The first factor in team effectiveness is the diversity of skills and personalities. When
people use their strengths in full, but can compensate for each other's weaknesses. When
different personality types balance and complement each other.

The other critical element of team work success is that all the team efforts are directed
towards the same clear goals, the team goals. This relies heavily on good communication in the
team and the harmony in member relationships.

In real life, team work success rarely happens by itself, without focused team building
efforts and activities. There is simply too much space for problems. For example, different
personalities, instead of complementing and balancing each other, may build up conflicts. Or
even worse, some people with similar personalities may start fighting for authority and
dominance in certain areas of expertise. Even if the team goals are clear and accepted by
everyone, there may be no team commitment to the group goals or no consensus on the means of
achieving those goals: individuals in the team just follow their personal opinions and move in
conflicting directions. There may be a lack of trust and openness that blocks the critical
communication and leads to loss of coordination in the individual efforts. And on and on. This is
why every team needs a good leader who is able to deal with all such team work issues.

Here are some additional team building ideas, techniques, and tips you can try when
managing teams in your situation.

* Make sure that the team goals are totally clear and completely understood and accepted by
each team member.

* Make sure there is complete clarity in who is responsible for what and avoid overlapping
authority. For example, if there is a risk that two team members will be competing for control in
certain area, try to divide that area into two distinct parts and give each more complete control in
one of those parts, according to those individual's strengths and personal inclinations.

* Build trust with your team members by spending one-on-one time in an atmosphere of
honesty and openness. Be loyal to your employees, if you expect the same.

* Allow your office team members build trust and openness between each other in team
building activities and events. Give them some opportunities of extra social time with each other
in an atmosphere that encourages open communication. For example in a group lunch on Friday.
Though be careful with those corporate team building activities or events in which socializing
competes too much with someone's family time.

* For issues that rely heavily on the team consensus and commitment, try to involve the whole
team in the decision making process. For example, via group goal setting or group sessions with
collective discussions of possible decision options or solution ideas. What you want to achieve
here is that each team member feels his or her ownership in the final decision, solution, or idea.
And the more he or she feels this way, the more likely he or she is to agree with and commit to
the decided line of action, the more you build team commitment to the goals and decisions.

* When managing teams, make sure there are no blocked lines of communications and you
and your people are kept fully informed.

Even when your team is spread over different locations, you can still maintain effective team
communication. Just do your meetings online and slash your travel costs. Click here for a free
test drive.

* Be careful with interpersonal issues. Recognize them early and deal with them in full.

* Don't miss opportunities to empower your employees. Say thank you or show appreciation
of an individual team player's work.

* Don't limit yourself to negative feedback. Be fare. Whenever there is an opportunity, give
positive feedback as well.

Finally, though team work and team building can offer many challenges, the pay off from
a high performance team is well worth it.