Team Building

We talked about team building quite a bit in our last class, and like some of my fellow classmates, I too have very little experience with team building exercises. In fact, the closest I would say that I've really come to participating in this type of activity would be in putting together and motivating teams as a business development counselor. In this role, I was a project manager charged with making sure the overall project met its various deadlines. This could mean licensing, obtaining permits, obtaining funding, writing plans, etc. The real challenge here though was never delegating responsibility; that part was usually pretty obvious as each team member was brought on to the project because he or she specialized in a specific aspect of the project. The challenge was setting timeframe goals for these projects and finding ways to motivate the many team members to strive to meet these goals.

One example that really comes to mind when I think of teambuilding has to with an urgent-care medical center which I was helping an entrepreneur to establish. The overall team for the project invloved the entrepreneur, building engineers, bankers, medical association representatives, marketers, and myself as a consultant. I found it extremely difficult from the onset of this project to coordinate the efforts of all of the parties involved. In truth, the team really had no sense of direction as each person had his idea of what was most important and how it should be done.

I eventually came to the conclusion that the entrepreneur would have to assume a leadership role in order to properly motivate the rest of the team. After all, it was ultimately his business in question, he just didn't know where to begin. I helped him setup and actually write down specific goals for each inidivdual to complete by a given date. Beyond that, I found that the best way to accomplish these goals was always to promote inter-reliance among team members. To accomplish this. we formed two separate 'subcommittees' . This was nothing official, but it meant that people on the business end (marketers, bankers, counselors) could collaborate and focus on business-related objectives without wasting the time of the others in the group. Likewise the engineers, medical association reps, and the entrepreneur (he was a doctor) could focus on the medical-related issues together. These 'subcommittees' really turned out to work quite well as the two smaller groups worked much more efficiently and the individuals within them were able to communicate much more effectively.

By the time our next monthly meeting came around, everyone had a great deal of progress to report. No longer did our meetings consist of one part of the team reporting results and passing the work onto the next team member.