MSG Team's other articles

10603 Performance Appraisal System for Virtual Teams

Performance appraisal is considered as a challenging task by many business managers. It becomes all the more daunting in case of virtual workplace. With the virtual team members distributed globally and coming from different cultures and backgrounds, it is important to ensure that the entire process of performance evaluation is perceived as fair and upright […]

11422 Strategies to avoid Conflicts at the Workplace

It is rightly said that organizations are individual’s first home as one spends the maximum time here. Employees must treat their fellow workers as a part of one big family and must work together to achieve the goals of the organization. Conflicts must be avoided at the workplace to ensure that the employees give their […]

9145 Employee Etiquette – Codes of Conduct necessary for an Individual at Work

Etiquette refers to good manners required by an individual to find a place in the society and gain respect and appreciation from others. Individuals working in organizations to earn a living for themselves are called employees. It pays to be a little mature and sensible at the workplace. Avoid being too casual. Employee Etiquette Employee […]

11961 Why Do Some Business Leaders Attain Greatness Whereas Others Fail?

What Makes Some Business Leaders Truly Great? Business Leaders such as Bill Gates of Microsoft, the Late Steve Jobs of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Paige and Serge Brian of Google, Warren Buffet of Hathaway Berkshire, and closer home, NR Narayana Murthy are known around the world as great persons who exemplified the best […]

12178 Role of Dressing in Public Speaking

Dressing plays an essential role in public speaking. It is the way you dress which speaks volumes about your personality and confidence. A public speaker needs to dress as per the occasion, time and season. If you are addressing your office colleagues during the office hours, it is essential to stick to formal dressing. You […]

Search with tags

  • No tags available.

Team Building and Experiential Learning

In order to be effective, team building strategies must focus on building cohesion, unity, discipline, reliability, and above all, the need to maintain clear channels of communication and to establish the chain of command in the hierarchy.

To start with, team building strategies have to focus on building cohesion within the team. This can be done through formal and informal methods of training that can include brainstorming, formal meetings, and informal experiential training.

We will be using the term experiential training throughout this article and it would be useful to consider what it is.

As the term suggests, experiential training is the practice of involving the team members to share and participate in experiences together.

In other words, the objective of experiential training is to ensure that team members work as a unit and consists of a series of activities that focus on actualizing the team building outcomes.

The Example of the Armed Forces

In this context, it would be pertinent to take the example of the United States Armed Forces that builds up cohesion and discipline within the teams by focusing on shared experiences in boot camps and other such events.

Indeed, given the fact that the Armed Forces in any country have to have a high degree of discipline and self-control as well as the ability to follow orders and establish the chain of command, the members of the Armed Forces are usually put through grueling sessions where the objective is to make them trust each other as well as obey the commands of the captains and those who lead the teams.

Formal Methods of Team Building

Having said that, there can be other methods of team building apart from experiential learning and this can include the workshops where team members are given game and exercises that entail them to engage in role-playing and other activities where the outcomes of strategic learning and who plays the roles of the different strategy drivers and followers are the intended objectives.

In addition, by making them work on group activities and other forms of gaming, the team members are taught to trust each other as well as rely on each other for support and guidance.

For instance, returning to the experiential and Armed Forces examples, exercises such as trekking and rock climbing as a unit are often encouraged and are a part of the training so that team members trust each other in both life and death situations as well as during the normal course of operations.

How Corporates Can Instill Team Building Values

While corporates need not engage in life and death situations, nonetheless, they need the team members to work together in crisis situations. Moreover, given the disruptive external landscape that organizations work in, who can say for sure that life and death situations would not happen even for corporates.

Indeed, the fact that business contingency planning entails disaster scenarios such as fires and earthquakes, it is important for corporates as well as to make the team members trust each other and be reliable and be of support and guidance during extreme events as well.

In this context, it is worthwhile to note that effective team building also needs the chain of command to be solid and the channels of communication to be clear and free from noise and the organizational arteries to be unclogged.

For instance, just as the Armed Forces need the soldiers to follow orders even to the extent of sacrificing their lives, corporates too need their team members to follow instructions from the managers though if possible, in less extreme situations?

Establishing a chain of command means that the orders of the managers must be followed in all cases and when there is some dissent, it must be expressed openly and not be the source of political games.

In other words, even if a particular decision of the manager is contrary to what one believes ought to be the right or the relevant one, the dissenting team members must discuss the same openly with the managers instead of engaging in politics.

Further, the communication channels need to be clear and free from what is known as “noise”. For instance, the hierarchy must be respected and at the same time, the feedback from the rank and file or the bottom layers must reach the manager.

This two-way communication must not be accompanied by noise wherein the instructions and the messages are garbled leading to much friction.

In this context, it is also the case that experience and expertise must be recognized and if the fresh recruits or those who are younger when compared to the others put forward a relevant suggestion, then the arteries that run through the organization would benefit from the new perspectives that are brought forward by them.

Conclusion

Thus, it is clear that team building entails a broad range of outcomes that need to be actualized and hence, effective team building must take into account all the objectives and the desired outcomes.

Lastly, team building is as much about friendships and relationships as it is about professionalism, and hence, the focus of team building must also be on the development and the nurturing of relationships and personal friendships between the team members.

To conclude, organizations must follow the examples of the Armed Forces in fostering a spirit of camaraderie and cohesion within the team as well as use formal and informal methods of team building using experiential training.

Article Written by

MSG Team

An insightful writer passionate about sharing expertise, trends, and tips, dedicated to inspiring and informing readers through engaging and thoughtful content.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Clarity of roles within a team

MSG Team

Ten Important Characteristics of High-Performance Work Teams

MSG Team