Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance, Fourth Edition

Chapter 6. Bringing the Four Cs Together: Designing a Team-Building Program

The goal of any team-building program is to help the team engage in a continual process of self-examination to gain awareness of those conditions that keep it from functioning effectively. In Chapter Five we identified a number of symptoms of unhealthy teams. Having gathered data about such problems, the team must learn how to use that data to make decisions and take actions that will change team context, composition, or competencies in ways that will lead to a growing state of team health. Team building, in this sense, is a continual, ongoing process, not a one-time activity.

As mentioned in Chapter Five, team building often begins with a block of time, usually two or three days, during which the team starts learning how to engage in its own review, analysis, action planning, decision making, and even action taking. Following the first meetings, the team may periodically take other blocks of time to continue the process, to review progress made since the last team meeting, and to identify what should be done to continue to improve the team’s overall effectiveness. It is also possible that in time, the team will develop its skills for development to such a point that team members are continually aware of areas that need improvement and will raise them at appropriate times with the appropriate people, thereby making it unnecessary to set aside a special meeting for such action.

There is no single way to put ...