Why team building is important

Why does building a team at work matter? You can put any group of employees together and call them a team, but that doesn’t mean they’ll work well together. Focusing on team building and avoiding team building mistakes can help your company in many ways. Here are some examples:

• Sense of unity: Team building helps unite your employees, which can help them work well together on team projects.
• Open communication: Strong teams understand how to communicate well. Team members feel comfortable sharing opinions, concerns and ideas, which can help them work through issues.
• Increased productivity: When team members understand one another and know how to work well together, they can complete tasks efficiently. You’ll often see increased productivity because they don’t have to deal with miscommunication, bickering and other things that might slow them down.
• Employee satisfaction: Teamwork creates a positive work environment, which can improve employee satisfaction, retention and loyalty.
• Less stress: A team that works well together can create a less stressful work environment because it eliminates conflict.
• Greater creativity and risk-taking: Working with a team you can trust and feel comfortable with encourages employees to take more risks. They’ll likely share more ideas and explore new ideas, which can result in creative solutions.

Team building mistakes to avoid

The process of building a team requires you to be strategic and to be continuously working on the team. If you want to build strong work teams, there are several team building mistakes you should avoid.

1. Failing to have clear goals

Teams need clear goals for a project to succeed. If you don’t establish clear goals or fail to communicate those goals, it leaves the team without guidance. It’s nearly impossible to succeed on a project without guidance, which hurts team morale.

Define goals for the team before you start a project. Explain those goals and clear up any confusion from the beginning, and communicate any goal changes with the team along the way. If the team isn’t addressing the goals, redirect them and clarify as needed.

2. Playing favorites

It’s natural to have preferences in people, even when you’re the boss. However, showing those preferences is a quick way to kill team building efforts. When you play favorites, the rest of the team can feel bitter and unmotivated. They might start treating the favored employee differently, creating team friction.

If you have multiple work teams, avoid showing favoritism to one team over the others. This can pit entire teams against one another and hurt the motivation of teams that don’t get as much attention.

Analyze how you treat individuals and teams. Talk with other management team members, and listen to feedback from employees to evaluate whether you show favoritism to some people. You might not realize you’re doing it, so being intentional about not playing favorites is important.

3. Promoting unhealthy competition

A little competition can push team members to perform better. If that competition becomes too intense or unhealthy, team members can turn on one another. Less competitive people might bow out completely and perform poorly. Even your most competitive team members might feel resentment. The intense competition hurts relationships within the team and can cause a breakdown in working together.

Focus on uniting over common goals with various checkpoints along the way to ensure the team is on track. Celebrate the successes of the team and the differences between team members to keep it positive, and address overly competitive behavior or cut-throat tactics immediately.

4. Treating it as an occasional event instead of a process

Team building is often thought of as a trust building exercise or a one-time retreat. Those activities can help build stronger teams, but the idea of team building isn’t a one-time event. You can’t plan a day of team building activities and expect your employees to work in perfect harmony going forward.

True team building is an ongoing process with no finish line. Relationships change within a team, especially when new members join or old members leave. Monitor team relationships and continuously work on building trust and communication.

5. Waiting until there’s a problem

A related issue is waiting to work on team building until there’s an issue with the team. When you wait until the team breaks down, it’s more difficult to repair the damage and improve the team’s performance. This is especially true if there’s a sudden issue with communication or trust. It takes time to rebuild those relationships.

Even when employees seem like they’re functioning well as a team, continue strengthening the team to prevent a breakdown. If you notice even a minor issue, address it immediately before it grows.

6. Not recognizing strong teamwork

Employees don’t always know what a strong team looks like, or they might not fully understand your expectations of a high-performing team. By recognizing examples of strong teamwork, you reinforce those expectations and encourage your employees to continue them. If you demand strong teams but never give them recognition for meeting those expectations, it makes your employees feel like their efforts are for nothing.

7. Ignoring individual strengths and weaknesses

Not all team members are equal in their performance. Team members often excel in different areas. When building a team at work, recognizing and utilizing the strengths of team members can help improve overall performance. Team leaders also need to understand that each team member is different, so the way they interact with individuals might need to be different.

8. Not listening to team members

A quick way to shut down a team is by failing to listen to them. This is especially true if you’re the team leader. If a team member shares an idea or expresses a concern that you ignore, it teaches them that you don’t care and you won’t help them. They’ll stop coming to you, which leaves you out of the loop and may cause you to miss issues that hurt the team. It can also cause them to stop sharing their ideas with the team as a whole, causing you to miss out on fresh perspectives and good ideas.

Encourage team members to talk to you, and listen to all ideas and concerns. You can’t act on every idea you get, but acknowledging them and explaining why you’re going in another direction can help. Don’t ignore valid concerns or issues team members may have.

9. Micromanaging team building

Micromanagement in the workplace negatively affects employees. Don’t try to control every aspect of team building. When you’re doing all the work to build a strong team instead of letting the team members strengthen themselves, it’s less likely to be effective. Set your expectations for building teams and give your teams guidance, but put the ownership of doing the team building work on the team members.

10. Leaving team building to the employees

The other extreme is expecting employees to prioritize team building themselves. If you don’t set the expectation of improving and growing into a high-performing team, it might not happen naturally. Not all of your employees understand what it means to be an effective team member, and they might not know what you expect from a high-performing team.

11. Failing to acknowledge team differences

Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to building strong teams often backfires. Every team has a unique dynamic with varying abilities, preferences and unwritten rules about how team members interact.

Some teams gel immediately with strong communication and high productivity, while others need more coaching and guidance on working well as a team. Acknowledging those differences and working with teams on their level is a more effective approach to strengthening them.

12. Allowing cliques

People naturally gravitate toward others who have something in common. Cliques become a problem when groups isolate themselves, gossip about others and exclude people. It distracts from working as a team since clique members tend to only socialize with one another and don’t get to know their other teammates. It can segregate the workforce, create a toxic work environment and cause resentment.

If your employees don’t trust management or don’t feel they can safely share ideas, they’ll form little pockets, or cliques, where they feel safe to be themselves. A group of people who feel like they always get criticized by management or always get passed over for promotions might rally together and act negatively toward coworkers they feel always get praise.

Work on improving the company culture and creating an environment where everyone feels safe, and focus on building trust to make all employees feel valued. Talking to your employees and using their feedback for positive change can slowly improve the work environment.

13. Having unrealistic expectations

You might have a vision in your head of how the team should function and perform, but building to that vision takes time. Having overly ambitious or unrealistic goals for the team leaves you disappointed when those goals aren’t met. Pushing those unrealistic expectations on your team can cause stress and exhaustion, which interferes with performance. Even though you have the best intentions, your unrealistic expectations could be counterproductive.

14. Fostering distrust

Trust is a necessary component for having a high-performing team, and creating a trusting environment starts from the top. If management and team leaders distrust everyone or give employees reasons to distrust them, they often breed distrust throughout the team. That distrust creates a negative environment. Team members likely won’t work well together and will start relying only on themselves to get things done. This can hurt overall productivity and team relationships.

Build trust by giving team members room to make decisions for themselves. Trust that your employees know how to do their jobs well, and make the workplace safe for sharing ideas without ridicule.

15. Accepting poor communication

Successful teams know how to communicate with one another and other teams within the company. If you have team members who fail to listen or are afraid or unwilling to share their ideas and expertise, the team can’t function successfully.

Start with the team leader, who needs to model the communication you expect. Set expectations for communication, and work with team members on developing communication skills if necessary.