Team building is the process of turning a group of individual employees into a cohesive team, a group of people organized to work together interdependently and cooperatively to meet the needs of their customers by accomplishing their purpose and goals.

The purpose of creating teams is to provide a framework that will increase the ability of employees to participate in planning, problem solving and decision making to better serve customers. Increased participation promotes:

In order for teams to fulfill their intended role of improving organizational effectiveness, it is critical that teams develop into working units that are focused on their goal, mission or reason for existing.

Many times when you’re hired or promoted into a leadership role, the team is already there. You have to adapt your ideas and plans to fit the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the existing team.

But, sometimes, you get to create your own team. This can happen on special projects when you’re pulling people from different departments, or when you are creating a new department.

If you’re in the situation where you get to create a team from scratch (or have the opportunity to add headcount to an existing group), we would be happy to share with you our strategies that we have developed to putting a team together to work around your purpose.