No To Team Building, Instead.....

Let's organise a team building. No! Let's not organise team building. Instead, let's teach leaders how to build teams.

Have you noticed that leaders are not taught how to build teams despite it being one of the most important roles?

Building high-performing teams is crucial to success, yet even when team building takes place, it focuses on "Let's all just get along, shall we?" That is not team building. It is the basic requirement; if a team doesn't have that, they need coaching and conversations around disagreements. This is when they should bring in external facilitators for a couple of months to address those issues and lay the foundation for building a team.

When a team is dysfunctional and prone to conflict, the leader may dedicate months to stabilise the team by frequently bringing them together. Regular sports events outside of work are a great way to do that. Anything that is regular works. What doesn't work is a one-off team-building session.

So how do we build a team once the conflict is out of the way and the team is ready to work together? This is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask, "Based on what, do we build a team?"

Is it Strengths? Competency? Personality? The ability to execute, influence, build relationships or think strategically?

There are different ways to build a team, but we must pick one! We cannot build a team without the right pieces. Imagine trying to build a house, but you don't have the right bricks.

Leaders need to be taught about building a team because nobody can build it for them. More importantly, a one-off session will do absolutely nothing unless it teaches the team and the leader how to build the team going forward.

Let me know if you need help learning how to build your team. This is what I do, I teach leaders how to build high-performing teams.

Free resources on building teams: Resource 1 | Resource 2 | Resource 3