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Purpose of Team Building

Team building is necessary to support change in organizations. It is a collaborative effort between the employees who will carry out change initiatives and the managers and executives who provide leadership, guidance and vision for the proposed change.Team building is conducted for a number of reasons in organizations. It serves many purposes such as:

• Improve communications
• Motivation
• Creating a shared vision
• Goal setting
• Establishing rules and procedures
• Identifying strengths and weaknesses and how to overcome them
• Improve productivity
• Practice collaboration

Despite the intent behind team building, the effort is meaningless unless it is fully understood.Team building is often mis-characterized and leaders in organizations are only partially successful in implementing it. The reason is there are actually two objectives to team building:

1. The attitude or sense of teamwork – camaraderie and collaboration. This is the popular definition for team building. Although necessary, it does nothing more than to establish that everyone who is a member of a team is friendly and gets along with one another.
2. The formation of people based on skills and ability aligned with an organizations business objectives. This is the more measurable form of team building based on defined goals linked to specific people in an organization who can carry out the tasks to create real change

Team building to support change in organizations can happen as long as there is purpose and objectives illustrated here are built in it.

How a Business Process Management Consultant Can Help With Team Building

Business process management (BPM) consultants can help executives and managers build teams in organization in a number of ways once a team is established. By having a holistic view of an organization in the form of activities and functions. BPM consultants are able to continually monitor teams and make recommendations to leadership in the form of interventions to maintain performance levels and foster growth. Specifically, BPM consultants can do the following:

• Set objectives for stakeholders leveraging the team to enact change – define what the business wants out of the team building efforts and define visible results
• Identify the needs of the team and and work with leaders to help fill the gaps to make the team effective
• Provide exercises / activities to build, promote and foster the team’s success

At the conclusion of any team building intervention, the BPM consultant will typically submit a proposal after their evaluation with recommendations on continued improvement of team performance in their efforts to implement change.

Empowering Teams to Create Change

For organizational change to occur, team building workshops facilitated by BPM consultants, can be formed to achieve understanding, detailed plans, measurable objectives and delegation of responsibilities. The responsibility to manage change does not rest entirely in the hands of the employees. Ideally, they are to do the best to their abilities and what they are chosen for as members of a team. Responsibility, however, does lie in the hands of management and executives. Their role is to empower and enable the team to carry out change under their leadership.Managers and executives interpret, communicate and enable others, specifically the team, to enact change. They do not instruct or impose. Involving team members in the decision making process is a best practice to create change. Likewise, executives and managers need to be open to ideas from the team.Principles executives and managers should follow include:

• Involve and garner agreement from people within the system being changed
• Understand the current state of the organization
• Have a clear, future state of the organization in mind
• Plan development on how to reach the future state in stages that are measurable
• Communicate, involve and facilitate changes with people early, openly and often

Conclusion

Team building is a powerful tool to carry out change in organizations. Objectives behind team building and the proposed change must be clear, however. With the help of a BPM consultant to set objectives and identify needs, executives and managers fulfill team needs and empower team members to carry out change. Successful change will occur when it is a collaborative effort and a shared vision of a future, desired state is fully understood.