Team Spirit

Teams are potentially the most powerful human resource a company can call to action. when a group of individuals is given the opportunity to effectively merge its ideas, energies and ambitions toward a common vision or goal, anything -- from the most difficult, to the improbable, to the seemingly impossible -- can be achieved. Reaching this potential in today's corporate environment, however, is no small task. As employees are faced with downsizings, budget cuts, tighter schedules, heavier workloads, greater cultural diversity, and rapidly changing technologies, they find it increasingly difficult to meet responsibilities, let alone become animated and inspired to deliver extraordinary service.

A team can be defined as a group of people who are all focused on achieving a common objective. Each member may know his or her place within the team and they may be quite content to work towards the individual objective they have been given. When added together, all the smaller individual objectives then become the greater common objective. However, while this may provide for an efficient team that can work well together with great efficiency, it does not necessarily provide for a team where each individual member has the essential team spirit necessary for the team to become a real team in every possible way.

This is how a team spirit can be built into the team building process. Team members can be taught to appreciate how the pooling of individual talents and the sharing of skills and resources can strengthen the team, allowing it to achieve greater and better results. In other words, we fail to see the trees for the wood, in a way. It's only when we stand back and see our own personal objective within the overall perspective of the common objective that we start to become part of the spirit of the team. Instilling a team spirit in individual members can sometimes seem like an uphill struggle. It's often the case that certain people will resist the process, perhaps feeling that it's only a job after all, not a way of life. While that kind of attitude is perhaps understandable to some degree, it is certainly not wise to encourage it.

A team spirit will only be as strong as it is allowed to be. This means that team leaders and managers need to understand the value of individual members. A team worker who feels valued is much more likely to have the right team spirit, and they will be much more easily persuaded of its importance. While a team can easily operate efficiently without a good team spirit, it will nearly always operate so much better if each individual member has the right team spirit. For this reason it is certainly worth instilling with an effective team building exercise.