the mathews partnership

Team Building and Teamwork

Before companies decide on a team building strategy we find that there is a more fundamental question to be asked.

Do we actually need to be a team or do we just need to work together more effectively?

Katzenbach and Smith in their excellent book “The Wisdom of Teams” drew distinctions between working groups, potential teams, real teams and high performing teams. They also highlighted the dangers of becoming a pseudo-team when effort is put into being a team but the team's need to improve performance - often a step change is needed - has not been identified.

A real danger in many team building initiatives is that we go off for some “teaming”, get lots of warm feelings about each other (or not!) and it ends up not making any long term difference to the business. We can support you in making sure that you avoid that situation.

If we do need to be a team

• Are we clear on what it is that we will hold ourselves mutually accountable for?
• Do we have the right people and the right number of ppeople in the team?
• Do we know what team roles and behaviours are needed to achieve that, the gap between those and the behaviours we are presently engaging in
• Do we know what skills we need - problem solving, technical/functional, interpersonal?
• Are we clear about the performance results needed?
• How our group and team dynamics will support that?

If we need to be a high performing team are we prepared to put the effort into building the relationships that will achieve that?

Our findings are that if organisations are not very clear about about the above questions team building efforts will at best be sub-optimal and and worst will reduce the team's performance and effectiveness.

We have a well established and highly successful approach that enables groups to move from potential team to real team to high performing team.