How To Effectively Build Teams And Make Them Work

Today, ‘team’ has become a very loosely used word. People are calling any random group of people a team, even in the corporate milieu where it is very important to know what a team is and use it for progress. A team is not a random group of people. It is a set of people who come together to achieve a particular purpose. A corporate team looks after a particular assignment. A scientific research team tries together to invent or develop something. A sports team tries to win a sports event for their nation or their county or whatever it is that they are representing. Similarly, various teams exist and they can have differing number of members, but these members are all united with a common strand – they are trying to achieve a common goal. A team is a unique combination of people because, whichever way it is formed, it eventually turns out to be a group of people with complementary qualities. This is an essential feature of a team. Thus, in a corporate team, we might have a visualizer, an executor, a thinker, a planner and so on. These people have different merits and that’s what keeps them in the team. Their merits are different, but they are aligned in such a way that they complement the merits of other people. This is actually what makes a team a force to reckon with. We have to realize that we all have our plusses and minuses. None of us are perfect. That is the need to have teams in the first place. When we try to make a team, consciously or unconsciously, we try to unite with people who have talents that we don’t have. But our intentions are same. It is just that each one can do a particular job well toward the accomplishment of the goal. In many cases, teams will need a team leader. The team leader is the cohesive force that keeps the team members together. The job of the team leader is quite essential, in that it is he or she that acts like the glue in keeping the members - 9 - together. At the same time, the team leader sets and emphasizes upon the goals and ideals for the team.