Team Building Exercise

Building A Better Team by Understanding Team Development

Another year, another goal, and another team to get the job done. Spring Quarter 2012 is underway, and this year’s version of Project C is shaping up to be a major leap for the fledgling effort. This year, the team members are all familiar with the project from last year, most actually having contributed to the previous project. But, with new goals this year, as well as new community organizations, comes new challenges; in order to acclimate all those involved this year, I facilitated a team development workshop at last Thursday’s meeting.

Teamwork is a make or break quality in today’s workplace. As such, we focus on leadership and building better teams at Ohio University. With my role as a Leadership Consultant with the Amanda J. Cunningham Leadership Center, I reach about 400 students every quarter with programming stemming from understanding one’s personal values to being a better global citizen. Understanding Team Development is one of our more popular programs, and it was a big hit with the Project C team.

The learning outcome for the workshop is to gain an understanding of the 5 stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. By understanding these stages, a team member can then realize when a certain stage is taking place within the context of a real team experience, and act accordingly. We went through several activities to demonstrate real scenarios that put the theory into practice, and we had a lot of fun along the way.

This year's team successfully completes a "Birthday Lineup" challenge.

It is important to understand how to be a better team member when working on large-scale teams, such as the Project C team. We have 10 different teams (Design, UX, Animation, Development, Marketing, PR and 4 Production teams) all conjoining to create a joint-effort project, and things can get really hectic. But, after the awesome performance I saw out of everyone on Thursday, there is no doubt that we are going to be victorious at the launch of our highly anticipated project.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and if you are interested in learning more about leadership and leadership programming, visit http://www.ohio.edu/leadership for more resources.