Team building

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Team Building refers to a wide range of activities, presented to businesses, schools, sports
teams, religious or nonprofit organizations designed for improving team performance. Team
building is pursued via a variety of practices, and can range from simple bonding exercises to
complex simulations and multi-day team building retreats designed to develop a team
(including group assessment and group-dynamic games), usually falling somewhere in
between. It generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development, but
can also be applied to sports teams, school groups, and other contexts. Team building is not
to be confused with "team recreation" that consists of activities for teams that are strictly
recreational. Teambuilding is an important factor in any environment, its focus is to
specialize in bringing out the best in a team to ensure self development, positive
communication, leadership skills and the ability to work closely together as a team to
problem solve.

Work environments tend to focus on individuals and personal goals, with reward &
recognition singling out the achievements of individual employees. "How to create effective
teams is a challenge in every organization"[1] Team building can also refer to the process of
selecting or creating a team from scratch.

Contents

[hide]

 1 Reasons for Team Building

 2 Types of Team Building Exercises
o 2.1 Subgroups of Team Building Exercises
o 2.2 Models of Team Behavior
o 2.3 Organizational Development
 3 What does a Team-Building Consultant do?
 4 See also
 5 Notes and references

[edit] Reasons for Team Building

Reasons for Team Building include

 Improving communication
 Making the workplace more enjoyable
 Motivating a team
 Getting to know each other
 Getting everyone "onto the same page", including goal setting
 Teaching the team self-regulation strategies
 Helping participants to learn more about themselves (strengths and weaknesses)
 Identifying and utilizing the strengths of team members
 Improving team productivity
 Practicing effective collaboration with team members

What are Team Building Exercises and what is their purpose?

Team building exercises consist of a variety of tasks designed to develop group members and
their ability to work together effectively. There are many types of team building activities
that range from kids games to games that involve novel complex tasks and are designed for
specific needs. There are also more complex team building exercises that are composed of
multiple exercises such as ropes courses, corporate drumming and exercises that last over
several days. The purpose of team building exercises is to assist teams in becoming cohesive
units of individuals that can effectively work together to complete tasks.

[edit] Types of Team Building Exercises

Communication Exercise

This type of team building exercise is exactly what it sounds like. Communications exercises
are problem solving activities that are geared towards improving communication skills. The
issues teams encounter in these exercises are solved by communicating effectively with each
other.

• Goal: Create an activity which highlights the importance of good communication in team
performance and/or potential problems with communication.

Problem Solving/Decision Making Exercise

Problem Solving/Decision making exercises focus specifically on groups working together to

solve difficult problems or make complex decisions. These exercises are some of the most
common as they appear to have the most direct link to what employers want their teams to be
able to do.

• Goal: Give team a problem in which the solution is not easily apparent or requires the team
to come up with a creative solution

Planning/Adaptability Exercise
These exercises focus on aspects of planning and being adaptable to change. These are
important things for teams to be able to do when they are assigned complex tasks or
decisions. • Goal: Show the importance of planning before implementing a solution

Trust Exercise

A trust exercise involves engaging team members in a way that will induce trust between
them. They are sometimes difficult exercises to implement as there are varying degrees of
trust between individuals and varying degrees of individual comfort trusting others in
general.

• Goal: Create trust between team members

[edit] Subgroups of Team Building Exercises

 simple social activities - to encourage team members to spend time together

 group bonding sessions - company sponsored fun activities to get to know team
members (sometimes intending also to inspire creativity)
 personal development activities - individual programs given to groups (sometimes
physically challenging)
 team development activities - group-dynamic games designed to help individuals
discover how they approach a problem, how the team works together, and discover
better methods
 psychological analysis of team roles, and training in how to work better together

(and combinations of the above)

Team interaction involves "soft" interpersonal skills including communication, negotiation,

leadership, and motivation - in contrast to technical skills directly involved with the job at
hand. Depending on the type of team building, the novel tasks can encourage or specifically
teach interpersonal team skills to increase team performance.

[edit] Models of Team Behavior

Team building generally sits within the theory and practice of organizational development.
The related field of team management refers to techniques, processes and tools for
organizing and coordinating a team towards a common goal - as well as the inhibitors to
teamwork and ways to remove, mitigate or overcome them.

Several well-known approaches to team management have come out of academic work.

 The forming-storming-norming-performing model posits four stages of new team

development to reach high performance. Some team activities are designed to speed
up (or improve) this process in the safe team development environment.
 Belbin Team Types can be assessed to gain insight into an individual's natural
behavioral tendencies in a team context, and can be used to create and develop better
functioning teams.
  Team Sociomapping is an visual approach to team process and structure modelling.
This model is based on social networks approach and improves the team performance
by improvement of specific cooperation ties between the people.

[edit] Organizational Development

In the organizational development context, a team may embark on a process of self-

assessment to gauge its effectiveness and improve its performance. To assess itself, a team
seeks feedback from group members to find out both its current strengths and weakness.

To improve its current performance, feedback from the team assessment can be used to
identify gaps between the desired state and the current state, and to design a gap-closure
strategy. Team development can be the greater term containing this assessment and
improvement actions, or as a component of organizational development.

Another way is to allow for personality assessment amongst the team members, so that they
will have a better understanding of their working style, as well as their fellow team mates.

A structured teambuilding plan is a good tool to implement team bonding and thus, team
awareness. These may be introduced by companies that does teambuilding sessionsm, or
done internally by the human resource department.

[edit] What does a Team-Building Consultant do?

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A team-building consultant is responsible for each component of a team building

intervention. He will likely interact with the team once, or for a limited number of times.
During these first contacts, actively assessing the team, making recommendations, and
providing activities (exercises that compose a team building intervention) for the team are the
main responsibilities of the consultant. Moreover, usually a written proposal is required after
the evaluation process, in which the trainer indicates how he or she would go about
improving the team’s performance. Once the organization and consultant determine which
recommendations to utilize (if not all), the consultant is then responsible for providing a
useful intervention that will transfer back into the organizational setting. This responsibility
usually requires the consultant to create a detailed plan of events, while allowing for
flexibility. After the intervention has been employed, the consultant will typically evaluate
the team-building program and communicate the results to the organization.
2 Team Building

Developing business teamwork skills in the workplace has become a necessity in any type of
business. Teams are now more important than ever for surviving the highly competitive
environment brought about by the business world. Teamwork is more effective and the
results demonstrate this on many different levels.

Business teamwork functions in a manner that is collective. The idea behind this business
theory is that each team member is to receive guidance from one another based on their own
skills, knowledge and expertise. Teamwork should be as much a learning process as it is an
opportunity to utilize certain skills and excel in a specific area. When all the team members
come together, the collective skills of each come together to make a very big difference in
both the quality and quantity of productivity.

The most significant skills where business teamwork is concerned are the willingness to help
and guide others as well as take help and guidance from others. This is important, especially
when you stop to consider the vast range of skills each member possesses.

Your team will be much more effective if everyone is willing to share their knowledge and
accept the same from others. You should also be a very special asset when it comes to
clearing any doubts the team members have concerning your area of expertise because you
will be able to explain it in such a way that will make sense and put their minds at ease.

Business teamwork is important because it promotes working together. This means more
tasks will be performed in a shorter amount of time. If everyone is working together for the
same cause, problems will be solved quickly and efficiently because of what each member is
able to bring to the table individually. The company morale and each employee's sense of
accomplishment will also rise. This is why organizational leaders train people on how to
work as a member of a team. It's also what keeps the business moving in the right direction, a
process that is especially important in this ever-changing and constantly growing corporate
world we live in today.

Biography - Bill Gates

We are living in the information age. Everything nowadays revolves aroundcomputers and
electronics. A person in California can play another competitor in Iran a game of chess without
leaving their home by the use of computers. Computers have become a lot smaller and much more
famous around the world. One individual has played a big role in the computer industry. He is an
American business executive, chairman and chief executive officer of the Microsoft Corporation, and
a multibillionaire: Bill Gates. Gates, William Henry, III (1955- ) was born in Seattle, Washington.
Gates grew up in a very competitive family. His father, William H. Gates II, was an attorney. His
mother, Mary, was a University of Washington regent and director of First
He had to share his idea of the Personal Computer and make his dream come true. Gates has made
MS-DOS, in 1981, a computer operating system for the new IBM Personal Computer. " In the early
1980's, Gates help lead Microsoft from a developer of programming languages to a diverse computer
software company that produced computer operating systems, applications software and programming
tools. Working on BASIC for the Altair, Gates dropped out of Harvard, in 1977, to pursue his full-
time vision of, "a computer on every desk and in every home. Gates has challenged many companies
with there related products. Gates has let me communicate across the world with my computer, via
Internet, word process and many other functions on a computer. Gates was fascinated with computers
since the age of 12 and has been programming projects throughout high school career. MS-DOS runs
on 90% of the world"tms IBM computers. His parents placed him in Lakeside, an academic and
rigorous private school in Seattle. Gates also needed to use a lot of communications. I believe he has
made a great impact in all of us and in computer technology. VALUES Gates"tm values are mostly
teamwork and communication. He needed to use a great deal of team work in 1980, when Microsoft
was only a 32-person company.