Successful team building requires setting clear goals

Strengthening ties within a team and motivating it, for example via team building activities, is one of the primary tasks of any team manager. But many leaders hold such events only with the vague idea that it will help team members become closer; otherwise, they have no detailed plan of what they want to achieve, or even a clear idea about what team building does and what its functions are. For team building to be successful, you must define what you want to use it for. Here are a few tips on the directions in which you can aim team building.

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Bringing team members closer

First of all, team building events are good for the bonding of individual employees and their effective and informal cooperation in the future. This is especially true if the event involves people from different departments who do not usually work together, or if new members have joined the team.

New perspectives

According to Forbes, team building helps develop the creativity of both individual employees and entire groups. For many employees, team building means a change from the everyday routine and a chance to view problems and possible solutions from new perspectives.

Defining roles of individual team members

For a team to work in a smooth and efficient manner, its members need to have clearly profiled and defined roles. Such roles are initially distributed officially, but also through experience and over time as individual employees reveal their personalities. Team building events help detect and confirm the roles of individual group members.

Defining new procedures

Team building activities are an ideal way to try out the set-up and functioning of general work procedures of the given team in a new environment. Procedures, solving conflicts and efficiency of internal communication must work equally well in team building as in the office.

Finding unknown talents

A new environment and non-standard situations brought by team building activities are an ideal background for discovering new talents and skills of individual workers. You may find someone with knowledge nobody previously knew about that might be used in the future.

 

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Article source Forbes.com - prestigious American business magazine and website
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