The Goals of Team Building
Team building refers to the process of establishing and developing a greater sense of collaboration and trust between team members. Interactive exercises, team assessments, and group discussions enable groups to cultivate this greater sense of teamwork. Team building has many contexts, for example in sport clubs and work organizations.

In organizational development, whenever a team embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it engages in team building.

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• Its current strengths as a team
• Its current weaknesses as a team

Improving Team Performance
To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• Identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• Design any gap closure strategy

Sometimes the term "team building" (or "teambuilding") refers to the process of establishing specific groups to accomplish certain tasks in an organization. Among the ingredients that are critical to the successful set-up and launch of such team efforts are:

• Setting proper goals and objectives
• Creating reasonable timetables
• Developing useful metrics for measuring success or failure
• Training on how to work together, including proper communication and listening skills

The morale of the team is an important variable and is often affected by such factors as:

• Support
• Resources
• Communication
• Personalities

 As team performance reflects on management, managers should take part in constructing and fostering teams.

Team Building Exercises
A current, and successful, trend in team building is having teams work together in various team building exercises outside of their normal job duties. These can range from working together as a team to solve a puzzle or some type of game, corporate excursions to partake in team sports or similar activities, or dedicated team building sessions that focus on communication, trust, allocating roles, and learning how to work together.

Adapted from Wikipedia.com - the free encyclopedia