People in every workplace talk about building the team, working as a team, and my team, but few understand how to create the experience of team work or how to develop an effective team.

Productive teamwork moves you toward challenge, through change, with more confidence. Working well on any team generates energy and enthusiasm for life. Desire alone does not create high-performance teams.

A team building success is when your team can accomplish something much bigger and work more effectively than a group of the same individuals working on their own. You have a strong synergy of individual contributions.

In real life, teamwork success rarely happens by itself, without focused team building efforts and activities. There is simply too much space for problems.

For example, different personalities, instead of complementing and balancing each other, may build up conflicts. Or even worse, some people with similar personalities may start fighting for authority and dominance in certain areas of expertise.

Even if the team goals are clear and accepted by everyone, there may be no team commitment to the group goals or no consensus on the means of achieving those goals: individuals in the team just follow their personal opinions and move in conflicting directions.

There may be a lack of trust and openness that blocks the critical communication and leads to loss of coordination in the individual efforts. And on and on. This is why every team needs a good leader who is able to deal with all such team work issues.

...Would you like to increase the performance of your teams?