Team building is a crucial aspect of getting the best from your team. Team building is an activity event strategically and deliberately designed to increase team performance. It is important to mention here that team building isn’t about the practical, functional, and technical process skills that the team carries out.
Nonetheless, some of the best team-building events are training events. If team training is well-designed and it is respectful to the team, and it teaches them something valuable, and they work together collaboratively to learn, then this aspect can have a huge impact on team building as well.
So, one cannot rule out the value of team training as a smart way of team building. The fact remains that team building is primarily about the social and cohesion aspects of teams and how they work together. Before we look into the BTS of what makes an exceptional team-building event host, let us assess the importance of team building.
Why is Team Building Important?
If you have a team, investing in that team’s effectiveness makes perfect sense. That said, daily leadership is the primary way to invest in your team’s effectiveness. Sometimes, however, there is not enough time and scope to develop their team sufficiently – during their daily routines.
For an effective team-building event, you will need to take your team out of their daily environment.
Typically, team-building interventions tend to have the following purposes:
Remedial – the team building event is primarily there to fix a problem. It could be any problem – a communication problem, or it may be a trust problem – or any other conflict. It could, however, also be a physical problem that the team needs to work together on to solve.
Developmental – the alternative to remedial is a developmental tea, building activity. These activities exist to help the team move from an acceptable level of performance to an even higher level of performance.
Some other purposes of team building events include the following:
- Alignment around team objectives
- Improving collaborative behaviors
- Resolving/ reducing conflict
- Increasing trust and confidence
- Strengthening processes, such as decision-making
You will want to start with the forming stage when the team comes together. The most important aspect of this stage is to help team members learn about each other and get to know one another.
Great activities for this team-building event are typically focused on sharing experiences, skills, backgrounds, and aspirations for the team. The other thing that you will want to do during the forming stage in team building events is work on making sure that everyone in the team fully comprehends and shares their commitments to the team’s goals and objectives.
How to Host a Team Building Event?
Now if you are going to do a team-building event, the essential question is about what you need to know to do it well. You will want to understand the different stages of the team-building event. Secondly, you will want to understand some things that you will need to be mindful of when planning to host a team-building event.
Understandably, team building events are typically a huge investment – not just in terms of resources and finances but also in terms of the time of the team. As a host, you will be taking the tram out of their workplace environment where they are productive and take them into a new environment.
With that said, if the team-building event is not as productive as you initially planned, then you are wasting everyone’s time. You will want to keep the following aspects in mind to make an exceptional team-building host:
i. Clear Objectives
You will want to be absolutely clear about what your objectives are for your team-building event, which means that you will be narrowing down all the things that you could achieve to a small number – ideally, one or two primary objectives that you will be focusing on.
If you make the mistake of trying to include loads of objectives, the chances are that you won’t achieve any of them. If you are very clear about the few things you need to achieve, you can design and plan the team-building event appropriately.
ii. Careful Design
You will want to design your team-building event carefully to hit your objectives. While designing the event – whether you are working individually or with a group of experts – you will have to be mindful of the potential constraints.
Yes – you read this right. There will be constraints on budget, resources, and time. But- there might be cultural constraints as well as constraints around the team itself, the values it holds, and the preferences of the individuals.
iii. Effective Debriefs
A lot of event hosts forget about the importance of the debriefing process, which is at the end of any team activity. You will need a well-facilitated process to ensure the team understands what it has learned from that activity and how it can apply that learning to the workplace.
Sometimes, as a host, your intention will be for your team to learn from the activity, and then it sinks in at the unconscious level and manifests itself in the workplace without consciously discussing it. But – a period of reflection is essential.
It is equally important to revisit the team building event with the team after the event to see how it is settling in and what you – as a facilitator – need to do to further capitalize on the investment you have made.
You will want to be cautious about the possibility of team rebellion. By and large – people love team-building events – but if there is an activity they don’t like and don’t understand why it is there and how it contributes, they might resent its presence.
Rebellion can destroy a team – but – even worse than that, it can strengthen a team’s cohesion in opposition to you – the team leader. You will have to make it clear to the team at some suitable point why the event and activity are relevant and the value it provides to them as a team to avoid resentment.