Teams competing in quizzes or Six Sigma teams reaching levels of excellence dreamt but only a few are testimony to the power of standing up for a belief system of passion, commitment, hard work, dedication, clarity of thought and the will to succeed as key ingredients to their success stories. Team building can be defined as a set of activities used to improve the efficiency of a group by developing improved working connections, in-depth comprehension and alignment among members, improved communications and an enhanced trust factor. Team activities can be further divided into four categories which fall within the purview of indoor and outdoor activities namely: personality-based category, activity-based category, skills-based category and problem solving-based category.

Each of these categories is dependent on the end result or purpose to be achieved for conducting the team building exercise. Direction without purpose is like a swinging compass without the poles to navigate through. Therefore, it becomes imperative that the optimum utilization of these opportunities should lead to greater rapport between the people, and increased productivity.

Personality based team exercises are essentially indoor operating through personality assessment assignments as well as ‘get to know your immediate neighbour’. Every participant is supposed to gather as much information about their immediate seated team member, as possible, within a given time frame. The information is then presented in an open forum to enable the rest of the team members to get to know each other better. Other assessment activities, such as introducing oneself in different ways, brings out the distinctive individualism of each participant and helps in being an ice breaker as well.

Activity based exercises are outdoor based ones with physically exciting adventure based tasks, like white water rafting. These exercises aid in understanding different types of risks and learning to depend and trust other. This is exemplified in the natural outdoor surroundings.

Skill based activities involve people with different skill sets to co-ordinate and assist each other in various tasks. These can vary from conceptualisation, designing, and construction ... to the creation of a unique service such as residential facilities on the Moon! The purpose is to bring together people with different skill sets and knowledge, to constructively contribute to the team efforts, avoid fractionalisation, and jointly cater to the successful completion of the end product.

Problem solving situations can vary from providing solutions to real life product or corporate scenarios (like case studies or even a tactical circumstance like a mock hostage situation) where logical thinking is required under extreme duress. Effective solutions have to be economically, technologically and ergonomically feasible, and especially relevant to the situation where the problem is supposed to be applied.

The more successful the teams are at working together, the better the business results and the higher the satisfaction of the team members. When team members are not cohesive, organizations experience lack of consensus, wasted meetings, mediocre or poor execution of work tasks, and low morale. A successfully integrated, focused, and driven team can work wonders. It took 20 years to build, but the pyramids of Giza are monumental wonders of the world, a result of intense planning and execution of teams and as they say-the rest is history…