Team Building Skills

Are All Teams Built Alike?

Team building skills are very difficult to quantify and teach. It is easy to spot a good team when you see it in action: it produces a superior performance, outclassing its opposition. This is most evident in sports. A team is capable of a superior performance than that of the individual players. I saw this in action in a particular team where the regular captain had overseas engagements and regularly rejoined his team after the start of the season. His team always performed well at the start of the season, but the performance dropped dramatically after his return. The team lost cohesion. It seemed that, though he was the individually more brilliant player, he lacked the essential ability to encourage teamwork and instead seemed to provoke division, with each team member striving for individual brilliance at the expense of the team.

There are many attempts to understand how a team forms, but perhaps the one that best explains what makes a team is that it is a shared attitude. This is epitomized in the musketeers’ motto, “All for one and one for all.” When I was in the army, it was standard practice to punish the group for individual infractions. The idea being to encourage the soldiers to realize their interdependence by treating them as one and in so doing, foster greater co-operation. In this context, it is interesting that the original meaning of the term “gung ho” is actually “work together”. Developing team building skills should therefore recognize this emphasis on interdependence and encourage it. A team is an entity, and a combination which has worked well as a team can cease to function with the addition of a discordant element, as in the example above. Perhaps the captain recognized and rewarded individual performances rather than team performances. It is noteworthy that the leaders of quality sports teams when accepting awards will usually emphasize the importance of the whole unit in their acceptance speeches, rather than just their own role.

There are many similarities between teams in sports and business, which would suggest that they are actually the same phenomenon. The differences come in the view researchers and management in the respective fields takes. Sports people seem to be more inclined to see the team as a unit, perhaps because of the factors previously cited which are easily observable and common in the field. The business orientation tends to see it more as a matter of co-operation between the members of the team (which, of course it is) but then tries to identify some set of techniques which can be taught so that any group of random employees would form an effective team. The business approach does work to an extent in producing greater co-operation and less conflict, but the true scintillating performance characteristic of a team does not seem to come simply from mechanical techniques, trying to isolate any single factor because the success of a team is due to many factors, with individual psychology perhaps playing the biggest part. Any team needs to work together for it to achieve peak performance as it takes a few common experiences to understand each other well enough.

A team seems to be greater than the sum of its parts. Each member has a particular role which complements the skills of other members, with all prepared to subordinate their personal interests to that of the group and actual leadership rapidly passing between members depending on the abilities needed in the moment. It is therefore true that the whole team is responsible for overall performance, each member playing a part.

Developing team building skills needs to emphasize this psychological aspect to getting a good team going. Success can bring rich rewards. Perhaps the best way can be taken from agriculture – provide a suitable environment and encouragement to help a team form and emphasize the team rather than the individual.