Team-Building Matters: Connecting Your People With Intention

When it comes to organizational development, building high-performing teams is the holy grail for almost every business. When you have the right people with the right skill sets and the right mindset, all working together, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

Consider the attributes of high-performing teams. There are any number of “top 10” lists out there (like this one), but there’s a broad consensus on a few key elements: trust, open communication, collaboration and a shared sense of purpose.

And human relationship is at the core of each of those elements.

The question is, how do you grow those relationships? How do you bring your organization together in a way that creates that connection?

Team-Building Is About Building Relationships

Team-building isn’t a new concept. Most leaders understand the value of dedicating time and effort to fostering closer relationships among team members. But some hear the word “team-building” and imagine role-playing games in off-site conference rooms, where everyone eyes each other uneasily as a facilitator encourages them to “break the ice.”

In fact, team-building doesn’t have to happen outside the office at all in order to have an impact. (Though to be clear, I think off-site events and activities can make for excellent team-building opportunities: a day of employee volunteering, for example, or a company-sponsored sporting event.)

There are many ways to strengthen team dynamics and trust. In my experience, it’s not really the “where” or even always the “what” that matters; it’s the feelings generated through the shared activity that create the greatest impact.

The real key is to get people involved and committed to something bigger than themselves. The communal enthusiasm fosters a sense of camaraderie, belonging and connection — both to the larger goal and to each other.

When your team gets a chance to be involved in something that affects everyone, they pull together.

Strategic Planning as Team-Building

Let me give you an example. I once worked with a manufacturing client to craft and then roll out a strategic plan for the organization. As part of that exercise, we brought the entire company together — operations, accounting, finance, engineering — to lay out the corporate roadmap. We went through a high-level goals and objective-setting exercise, so that everyone could see and understand the general direction that the company’s leadership wanted to go.

But once that high-level work was done, each department held their own smaller meetings to define what those high-level objectives meant in the context of the different company functions. This allowed department leaders and their teams to get more specific and to translate those broader goals into actionable plans for their own domain areas. 

Managers got a chance to hone their leadership skills, and team members had the opportunity to provide input on how they saw the larger objectives fitting into their day-to-day operations. Each department had a different take (and different approaches), but this more focused effort is what helped bond them to the larger corporate mission.

From there, departmental goals were translated into individual goals for each employee. In the end, the initial top-down approach resulted in a complementary bottom-up process that ensured each team member felt they had a direct role to play in the success of the business.

Everyone felt like they had more skin in the game.

And they weren’t only committed to their own performance. They were energized by the collaborative effort of the whole exercise, and excited about what it meant for the company (which was not surprising — this Stanford study found that mere cues of working together boosts motivation and for some, can turn work into play). Incidentally, this is also why I’m a big proponent of involving people in the process of technology change.

Team-Strengthening Opportunities Are Everywhere

Not every team-building initiative has to involve a monolithic, organization-wide activity. After all, we build company culture at different levels, in big ways and small.

For example, something as simple as taking time during a weekly department meeting to celebrate each other’s wins is more powerful than you might think: It allows team members to focus, in a genuinely positive way, on the accomplishments of others. The mutual respect and recognition fuel the satisfaction of knowing that they’re all pulling together to achieve something bigger, and that they are allies in the fight.

Another great exercise in team-building is to focus on a new learning or growth opportunity for a group.

In one of my client engagements, I worked with a company to deliver training to their sales team. We followed a similar approach to the one I described above: We started by laying out the high-level sales objectives and the targets they’d need to meet to get there, but then allowed people to drill down and think about what they were going to do individually to support that goal.

It was a powerful experience for them. The resulting sense of cohesion and alignment led to a direct uptick in their sales. As a team, they accomplished so much more together than they could have achieved working on their own.

At the end of the day, team-building doesn’t have to be complicated or formal — but it should be intentional. Any activity that creates a communal sense of goodwill and commitment to a larger purpose is well worth the time and effort you put into it.

For more articles like this one on ways to bring your team together, visit the Executive & Organizational Leadership section of our blog.