Team Building: Enhance Relationship Among Team Members 🔗

Introduction

For most of us, teamwork is a part of everyday life. Whether it's at home, in the community, or at work, we are often expected to be a functional part of a performing team. Having a strong team will benefit any organisation and will lead to more successes than not. Team and group dynamics are influenced by many factors, such as the larger context in which the team operates, the organisation, the team identity itself, and the mix of individuals within the team. Within this mix of influences are the individual team members who likely have specific kinds of work to perform and specific roles on the team. Individual members influence the team dynamics as well, so much so that when the composition of the team changes, the team dynamics will change. An important note, team members are individuals first, and they each bring different talents, perspectives, values, and experiences to the work of the team. The more self-awareness each team member has, the more actively he or she can contribute. The more each team member knows about the other team members, the better she or he can tap into the talents and experiences of others for better team performance. This essentially involves the key aspects of relationships and communication. Individuals of different personality types are unique in the ways they build relationships and deal with conflict. When we try to forge better relationships, we can easily do something that undermines the relationship instead of improving it if we don't take these differences into account. Personality differences show up in how we tend to communicate as well as how we like to be communicated with. Amazingly, teams often start right off doing the work rather than clarifying what the work is. They assume others see the assignments in the same ways they do. Much conflict and waste of time and resources could be avoided if teams spent a little bit of time to be sure they all share the same view of what they are to be doing and what the outcomes will look like.