Michael, if you can't pass, you can't play. - Coach Dean Smith to Michael Jordan in his freshman year at UNC
Teamwork in a company is like a sports game: everyone has their roles, and the success of the company largely (and sometimes completely) depends on the team members’ co-operative skills.
When it comes to team building, some things don’t change over millenniums. Some thousand and more years ago, the spirit of community was sustained by singing, playing games and taking part in rituals. Today modern businesses hire team building specialists. The purpose is the same – keeping together, working efficiently towards common goals, surviving and prospering.
Team building refers to building a cohesive team unit where co-workers work together in a spirit of collaboration. Team building rests on the idea that teamwork skills can be developed through training and experience, e.g. various team building activities, games and interactive exercises.
Teamwork joins people with different talents, personal qualities and points of view, so the most important (and the most challenging) aspect of team building is that it is aimed at bonding those different types of people together into a team capable to fulfil the company’s mission. Ideally, a team consists of individuals each performing one of the four different but strongly interrelated functions.
The first function is generating ideas. This is the first stage of the teamwork process. During this stage, all ideas and concepts are born. Those who create ideas usually transcend the norms and look for unusual and unique solutions. They hardly ever care about how their ideas will be realised and whether they can be realised at all. So in the second stage, the initiative is taken by those who evaluate these ideas and create plans of their realisation. People belonging to this group carry out the function of a filter: they analyse the ideas taking into consideration market conditions as well as the company’s abilities and experience. The plan is then presented to ‘assessors’, who usually provide criticisms, foresee various threats, look for weak points and critical moments of the proposed ideas and suggest adequate improvements to be made. Finally, there is the fourth group of people who implement those ideas (the team usually also has a leader who performs the mediator’s function and makes sure that the programme is being implemented consistently). Thus, different types of people able to co-operate is important for any organisation’s development.
A huge advantage of teamwork is the exploitation of different areas of knowledge, experience and traits different people have; but to make teamwork happen, and to teach different talents work in harmony towards the same goal, some extra effort has to be put. Learning and practicing skills of collaboration such as trust or recognition through team building activities is one of the ways to do it.
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