Leading a Team and You Want to be Proud of a Team That Smashes Through Walls?
These team building tips will help you to create a team that delivers day in and day out.
Tips 1-10
- 1. Understand Tuckman’s team-building model, identify which stage your team are in, and discuss together how you will get to the next stage.
- 2. Praise more than you don’t.
- 3. Have no favourites.
- 4. Accept that you are not good at everything because you can’t be and lean on members of your team to do what you cannot.
- 5. The key to having an effective team is trust between each member of the team, and understanding the trust model is critical to that success.
- 6. Hold a team session and ask everyone to write on each other’s back (a page has been sellotaped to their back first) something they like or admire about this person.
- 7. Use the HBDI psychometric profiling tool to enable everyone in the team to understand more about themselves and others because they will be tolerant and accepting of each other.
- 8. Learn something new as a team as this helps to develop support for each other.
- 9. Stamp out gossip, backstabbing, and talking badly of each other, by leading the way with positive talk about what people do.
- 10. Share with your team that as the team leader there will be 3 types of decisions; Your decision as team leader, a majority decision where they vote, and a combination where you will ask their opinion & then make a decision.
Tips 11-18
- 11. Tell people what was good about the good thing they did because if people know what they do well, they will do more of it, and then they will start telling others why they did well, too.
- 12. Have a common goal where the team are dependant upon each other to achieve it, as a rugby team depends on each other to win a game.
- 13. Agree on smaller goals (milestones) and celebrate the wins along the way.
- 14. Encourage each member of the team to regularly feedback to other members of the team. Something they do well and something they could improve.
- 15. Remember that on team building days creating competitions can create rifts across the teams.
- 16. Agree on 7 simple team ground rules for how you work together and change them as the team evolves.
- 17. Embrace the difference people bring. In the words of the film World War Z, with Brad Pitt ‘If 9 men look at the same information and come to the same conclusion, it is the job of the 10th man to disagree’.
- 18. Encourage ambition when it arises and it will then continue to arise.
There we have it, 18 one-sentence team building tips to bring your team together, and ROCK! You can also take the team-building skills self-assessment.
Action: For even more useful content on team building, check out our ultimate guide on Team Building Skills.
