Team Building Strategies That Work for Your Organization

Many strategies exist to build effective teams. This article will outline just a few ideas for strategies to build on for your organization. There are two main approaches to managing your own team building strategies; formal and informal approaches. Author Jon Katzenbach, author of "Leading outside the Lines," writes that both must be present in an organization. Formal structures include organizational charts, vision, mission, and operating guidelines. These formal mechanisms provide a framework for the informal processes that complement them. Informal processes include the way that people interact, the leaders they informally chose to follow, the relationships they forge to get their work done. An effective team building strategy can include both to ensure that gains are made on both fronts.

Formal Team Building strategies include training workshops, agenda-driven meetings, and written processes and procedures. Effective team building strategies here can include a high-level look at how you want your organization to team. For example, many corporations have developed a "matrix" driven approach to work-expecting individuals to link across departments and other boundaries. A matrix organization allows more work to flow.  This results in increased focus on the products development and services that clients or end users need. This collaborative structure should include formal team building strategies and training for increasing collaboration, communication, problem solving and innovation across the organization. Project management skills and work flow charts are also helpful formal team building strategies to help people function in this way.

Informal team building strategies include things like workspace redesigns that allow people to connect more directly. Small break-out rooms, co-located desks, coffee break rooms, and fewer walls can bring people together more often in a casual way. Research supports that casual contact has a significant impact on teaming and collaboration. Other informal processes include shared lunches, off-site get-togethers, and other meetings of an informal nature.

Creating a team building strategy for your organization is imperative for future success, and can include things that you are already doing.  Combining both formal and informal team building strategies allows you to take advantage of both options.  For more information click here

Why Team Building Pays Off

Chicago, Illinois; Team building skills allow people to work together better, saving time, money and your most important asset-knowledge. The Corporate Learning Institute helps individuals and teams develop optimal collaboration skills. How do they do it? Recently, Dr. Susan Cain worked with a high profile client in Santa Barbara, California. The team, from a start-up company in famed Silicon Valley, California, was struggling. Bolstered by an impressive start, with sufficient investor funding and a great go-to-market service, sales flattened, the inevitable lay-offs occurred, and the team splintered into predicate factions. 

CLI partners Dr. Susan Cain and Dr. Tim Buividas were asked to help the team regroup.

"We worked within the CLI span of capabilities, which includes strategy development, cultural assessment, innovation and project management and team capability development," commented Dr. Tim Buividas.

Together, market position was assessed. Then, short, mid-and longer-range goals were revisited. A redeveloped strategy began to emerge with an action plan to generate early wins. "We had to combine team building activities with discussion to break through to deeper conversation," Dr. Buividas noted. The team made progress in developing open conversations in a more casual environment; they began to see how missed conversations led to silos and fed the fear factor rampant within the culture. 

"The team members stopped hiding out from each other and could now see themselves as one team. This only occurred after we introduced team building activities that required trust and communication to complete," Dr. Buividas concluded. 

CLI partner Dr. Susan Cain agreed. "We have developed a select grouping of portable team building activities that serve to engage clients directly in conversations about trust, collaboration, problem solving and innovative thinking. They can spark very deep conversations about the state of the organization’s health, about grudges that have been built between people, and about how to move ahead to solve even the organization’s biggest challenges."

Team building activities, combined with an organization’s business context needs can pay off in big ways. Today, the start-up that CLI worked with is back on track with their progress and clear on their common goals. Their road ahead is not easy, but is optimized by the new agreements and skills that they now have in place. "Combining team building with a strategic change agenda is a great way to improve the odds for future success," Dr. Buividas stated.