team building & leadership When facilitating Team Building & Leadership programs many tools and processes are used to strengthen the talent of the individuals. In strengthening talent & autonomy of people greater shared team, organizational knowledge plus capacity for accomplishing tasks is created.

What does that mean? Allow people to use what they are great at in the greatest capacity possible.

An area of concern for team building programs is that the individual talents must be acquiesced for greater good. I say NO – when a team is high functioning all the people are using what they are great at. Allowing each person to have accountability, responsibility, motivation, resiliency & autonomy to do the work.

Once people are asked to “hold back” on their talents because others on the team may feel insulted or are not able to complete their task a feeling of “why should I do my best?” is created.

When people are not completing the tasks there is a mis-match in what they were asked to do. If a person cannot complete a task then the delegation based upon their skill set, time frames, and ability are wrong for that person. The leaders responsibility in team building is to adjust this persons assigned task. This takes knowledge of the person and what their abilities are as well as a strong leader & team normative behaviors.

Challenging people to be Self-Directed and allowing them to be accountable for the outcomes of their choice while the leader has to balance what this person is capable of. Some people are able to handle tasks that have multi-level feedback and longer time frame needs. These people should be delegated tasks that match their ability. Once you delegate a task that is below that persons ability they feel under-appreciated.

Some people need to have less responsibility and more micro-managing done. These people should be delegated tasks accordingly.

Team building allow leaders and team members to gain a micro-view of people in situational transactions. When involved in these situational transactions people can see how others and themselves, think, act, handle conflict, handle long and short term delegation of tasks, are able to view the team as a whole, as well as how the individual works and treat others in projects.

This is powerful because rarely is the opportunity given for teams to explore and objectively view a project take place where all team members are present in real-time and are then led through processing and reflection to highlight and explore the strengths of the individuals and the team while involved in work.

Team Building & Leadership programs have a capacity to allow leaders and team members to see their own strengths in action. Allowing for the team to increase their shared knowledge of the capacities and abilities of themselves and each other.

 

michael cardus is create-learning