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"Team Building - An Essential Building-block in Creating a Collaborative Culture in a Project Team"
Robert Caldeira
What is all this talk about Team Building? A visit to the local business section of the strip mall bookstore or a keyword search via Amazon.com and Barnes and Nobles on-line, result in hundreds of books on the subject. Numerous authors, from many walks of life, have opinions to share on the subject. And what does it all mean?
Managing knowledge professionals in today's knowledge, or information age, begins with a premise that is built upon the power of teamwork. Classical management from the days of the Industrial Revolution simply do not apply. Complexity in today's products, technology and services requires experts in many disciplines to collaborate together to develop new products and services. Industrial revolution management theories from the days of "the master bricklayer managing laborers to build a brick wall" simply do not apply in today's society. Teamwork and leadership are the basis for developing products, technology, and services today. Our goal at CKA is to help exploit teamwork.
As mentioned before, hundreds of books and, literally, thousands of articles have been written on teamwork and leadership. Attempting to summarize the theories, recommendations, and opinions are quite a task. Numerous grad school and doctoral thesis have been written on the subject. However, several common themes do emerge from much of the material and most lower and middle managers can relate to these points.
Scores of studies document the success of teams in today's workplace. It is evident that the output of a team is far greater than the output of a single individual. Orchestrating a group into a team is the role of the leader and evolving a group into a team is a challenge. Lower and middle mangers can especially relate. Creating a collaborative culture in a project team is no trivial task. Establishing a high performance team is a development process. That is, a work unit must go through several phases of growth and change to become a high-performance team.
Steve Buchholz and Thomas Roth, well-known in the field of designing teamwork programs, describe the development process as three phases:
Phase 1: Collection of Individuals. When people are asked to work together, they initially form a collection of individuals. This first phase gives individuals the opportunity to form identities within the work unit. Phase 1 tends to be individual-centered, have individual goals rather than group goals, do not share responsibility, avoid changes, and do not deal with conflict. Members begin to define their purposes and responsibilities, identify the skills of other members, and develop norms for working with one another.
Phase 2: Groups. In the second developmental phase, work units begin forming groups. Members develop a group identity, define their roles, clarify their purposes, and establish norms for working together. However, groups tend to be leader-centered; the leader provides direction, assigns tasks, reviews performance, and is the primary focus of communication.
Phase 3: Team. The final phase, and difficult to attain, is that of an actual high-performance team, a team able to focus energy, respond rapidly to opportunities, and share both responsibilities and rewards. Teams are purpose-centered; members not only understand the purpose but also are committed to it and use the purpose to guide actions and decisions.
So, the difficult objective becomes How to evolve into a high-performance team?
Again, go on-line or visit the strip-mall bookstores. Or, better yet, begin scouring periodicals on the subject of building a high-performance team. Literally, hundreds of pages have been written on the subjects. Fortune 500 and 1000 corporations pay millions of dollars annually for speaking engagements from the latest, hottest authors on the subject. Consultants love this subject and Human Resource departments within these companies create divisions solely focused on this topic.
Many aspects figure into building a high-performance team: Leadership, facilitation, work environments, communication, motivation, participation, etc. Lengthy discussions exist for each one. However, the focus here at CKA is on team building and how it influences the creation of a high-performance team.
The focus at CKA is to provide a fun environment, outside of the office for the team to spend time together. Common sense tells us that teams must spend a lot of time together, especially at the beginning. In "The Wisdom of Teams," Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, leading thinkers on the subjects of organization and performance, believe that a team must spend a lot of time together to develop personal bonds. Personal bonding is just as important as analyzing spreadsheets, interviewing customers, competitors, etc. Spending time as a group outside of the work environment and having some fun is an important aspect of creating collaboration, trust, respect, and personal bonding.
Another important aspect that aligns well with the CKA program is team recognition. Glenn Parker, a top U.S. team trainer and author of several books on the subject, stresses the need for team recognition. Typically, corporations look to recognition as a monetary form of reward. This is great and many employees appreciate the monetary offer. However, there are also many nonmonetary forms of reward that encourage and support team-player behaviors. The CKA event complements this type of nonmonetary reward while providing a fun, team building environment. It is also known, as Mower and Wilemon (1989) summarized in their paper, "Rewarding Technical Teamwork," that technical and scientific personel are often the least interested in teamwork. However, technical professionals will work together much better when there is thoughtful recognition for their efforts and, especially, when there is respect from their peers. Again, the CKA event is a great solution.
The purpose of our Website is to not summarize and condense all of the work conducted in the area of teamwork and team building. The purpose of our Website is to stress the benefits of providing teams with a fun, outside event that allows them to unwind, create more personal bonding, and/or participate in a great form of recognition. Our goal at CKA is to provide an event, which meets these objectives. We are convinced our venue exceeds these objectives.
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