A team is more than the people that make up the group. A team is one unit, interdependent, working cohesively toward a common goal. A group of people become a team through shared experiences like team building exercises . Once that group is a team, a mission can be accomplished in a much more effective manner. Given a purpose, a team can cut through the time wasted in learning trust and work supporting one another to achieve a goal that a simple group of people could not reach as quickly.

Creating a team from an incoherent group of people is possible with some preparation and purpose. Teams can be created unintentionally, but lack focus and tend to become non-creative quickly. To create a team from a given group of individuals, first determine the strengths and weaknesses inherent to them. Once those are known, a plan can be created to exploit the strengths to buttress the weaknesses, and to then give the new team a direction. Consideration should be given to the duration of the group needed. If this is to be a short-term mission, as a project with a duration of days or weeks, team building can be correspondingly brief. If this is intended to create a tight-knit group of colleagues who will be working together for months or years, taking the time to evaluate and build a team will be rewarded with heightened productivity and creativity.

Team building exercises can be as quick as fifteen minutes or as lengthy as a week. They can be implemented during weekly meetings, or become an annual retreat for colleagues to bond and reconnect with one another and their purpose. As valuable as exercises for team building are, care must be taken that they not backfire. Exercises that expose employee’s emotions risk turning a manager into a therapist, and are not conducive to a professional workplace environment. Exercises that demean or belittle participants risk turning the group into a team with a common enemy – their manager.

The facilitator for the team building exercises need not be the manager. In some cases it may be better to have those in leadership join the group as equals. The facilitator will make or break the exercises, and must be chosen carefully and with proper preparation. The purpose of the facilitator is to keep the group moving along planned motion to the desired outcome of the exercise, not to do the work, or to solve all the problems. After the exercise, the facilitator may also step into the role of debriefing, to help the team understand the significance of what they have just undergone.

There are many specific exercises for team building available in books, online, and even published in industry journals. The difficulty will be in discovering the best exercises for your purposes. Consider the behaviors you want your team to exhibit. Competitive behavior when more than one team is pitted against one another is a powerful tool, but might not be the result you seek. Collaborative behavior within the team is an optimum result, and might also be desirable in a situation with more than one team. Task orientation, keeping focus on the job at hand, is important within the team. Strategic awareness is not necessary for all the members of a team, but those who do have it must be taught to make it clear to their teammates. Challenging behavior might seem at first blush to be undesirable, as one teammate challenges another, but it is necessary to formulating good decisions as a group. Nonverbal behavior, the art of communicating without speaking, is a very good sign that a team is starting to gel. Dysfunctional behavior like conversations that spring up off to the side, or one team member doing all the talking, must be watched for and quashed.

Doing team building just once is not enough. Like a tree, your team must be pruned, watered, and cared for. The organic dynamics of a team are much like a living organism. Training must occur regularly and with purpose to achieve the beautiful results of a group of people functioning as a tightly knit team with a single focus.