Team Building
The Essence
The legendary Notre Dame football coach, Knute Rockne said it all: “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”
Vince Lombardi, no slouch himself at putting together great teams, said: “Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
Another football great, Joe Paterno, offered this insight: “When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”
Henry Ford knew a little about building teams when he said: “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”
No one wanted to argue with Steve Jobs when he said: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
One of the greatest team players in history, Babe Ruth, said this: “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”
Team building is the third leg of the human resources triumvirate – RECRUITING – TRAINING – TEAM BUILDING. Until very recently, team building was an afterthought usually left up to the training function or the department heads themselves. Office morale and efficient work flow were seen as every manager’s responsibility. After all, wasn’t it the boss’s job to motivate and lead?
Recruiting and training the best and the brightest and molding them into efficient work groups is now seen as a highly refined professional skill. Back in the day, only charismatic leaders like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs possessed this apparently inborn talent. It was called, “building a great company” and only outliers like Ford and Jobs could do it. Today, the human resources triumvirate is considered an essential in competitive companies, and the team building function now falls to professionals.
Premier Meeting Services designs and executes team building activities and events that seek to:
• Invite new employees to feel like part of the group.
• Instill a sense of mutual benefit in defined work groups.
• Transform company goals into personal goals for all employees.
• Create a common sense of purpose among diverse individuals.
• Encourage employees to have fun at work.
• Help employees feel comfortable depending on one another.
• Help independent personalities learn to trust the team.
• Help Type A employees consider the “other”.
• Promote a deep sense of loyalty in all team members.
Humility is no longer considered a virtue among high-achievers. All successful teams, however, depend on separate, independent individuals seeing themselves as part of something bigger and understanding that they can only accomplish their personal goals by helping the team accomplish its goals.
Can team building events teach today’s employees to replace narcissism with humility? That is the challenge facing every human resource department in the country. It’s a big ask but at Premier that’s what we aim to do.
