When you start a business, one of the most important things on your mind will be your team. Employees run your business for you, after all, which is why you need an incredible amount of trust and faith in them in order to get the most out of their services. You’re paying them a salary, offering them benefits and giving them a lot of your attention, which is why it’s incredibly important to make the most of your investment and build a team that you can be proud of.
However, building a team isn’t easy. To use a sporting analogy, you can’t simply gather all of the top players in a league, fit them on a team and expect them to be an unbeatable all-star team. It takes a lot of practice, time and effort to turn individual talent into a skilled team. One of the main things that business owners do in order to build team synergy is to take them on team building activities. However, these rarely ever work because of one simple reason: you can’t force people to work together.
Team building activities and events are made to boost your team’s productivity and morale. Its main focus is to get your team to work together and to form a working bond between your staff so instead of being unproductive or lone wolves, they can band together and solve problems together. However, just because you went to play a round of golf together or you worked as a team to play a game of soccer against another group, it doesn’t suddenly make you a formidable team. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear employers blaming either the services used or their own team for a failed attempt at team building.
Instead of relying on these services, you can take team building into your own hands to both save money and create a better team that is suited for your business. It takes proper corporate training programs and experience to develop these ideas, but we’ve filtered it down into a handful of useful tips that you can apply to your business right now.
Teams don’t always have to work together
Let’s face it, what does your tech team have to do with your accounting team? One department focuses on fixing computer hardware, the other crunches numbers. The only reason these two departments would even bother talking to each other is if someone from the tech team has an issue with their payslip or someone’s computer at the accounting department broke. In terms of actually working together to achieve something, there are very rarely any situations where these two departments will work together.
In that case, why do we force them to play a sport together or work as a team during these silly events? There is virtually no need for it and the time and money can be better spent doing something productive instead. In other words, it doesn’t always make sense to force a team to work together if they work at different ends of your business—it’s simply a waste of everyone’s time and money. There is, however, a much more reliable way to build a team.
Team building is an excuse for a lack of leadership
If you need to build a team, then it’s a bad sign for your business. The need for team building usually comes from a lack of faith from your employees or a lack of company direction. Employees that feel empowered to work for you will always know how to act, where to go and how to work together with the rest of the team. A team with no leadership or direction will go the opposite way and fail to build any kind of teamwork.
Problems within the company itself and the structure cannot be solved with team building activities. The only way to fix these deep-rooted issues is to tackle the problem head-on. If there are problems within the company due to leadership, then you need to assert your control over the team and give them the direction they need to follow as a group. You are a business leader, after all, so you need to show that you’re capable of leading the team and helping them band together whenever your business is going through some tough times. Diagnose the issues that you think are preventing your team from working together, break the problem down into easy-to-fix points, and you’ll find that your company can prosper without the need of too many external team building or training programs.
No comments yet.