Building a team is tough. That seems to be the consensus.

Which is pretty odd, when you think about it. After all, human beings are social animals; we like to form groups. So why is it that we seem to find it so hard to form a team in our projects?

The problem isn’t really with forming a team, or a group, it’s with forming the team we want. Normally, we would form social groups with people we like, and the traits and attributes that we like in those people may not necessarily be the ones we would value in a team member.

And therein lies the problem. We select project team members based on attributes other than how well they get on with the rest of the team members. This is based on the not unreasonable expectation that they will be professional enough to work with pretty much anyone.

Much of the time, when there isn’t too much pressure on the team, this works out fine. People are professional enough to just get on with their job. But where this falls apart is when you start putting pressure on the group.

At that point, tensions rise to the surface. Little irritations explode into major problems. And people who were just getting on with their job start to feel less willing to do that.

The problem is the level of commitment, of connection to the project, that a group of individuals has is much lower than that of a team. A team is working towards a common goal, and feels a duty and responsibility to each other, and to the project.

That means that when a team is put under pressure, they work together to defeat the problem, to build the solution, to find the right path to their goal. Pressure can actually help a team be more productive, not less.

Building a team, then, requires emphasising and promoting the values and goals the members share, it involves listening to them, helping them all work together. But most importantly, it involves recognising that most of the work of building a team has to come from the team members themselves.

Yes, you can help the process, facilitate it, provide an environment which makes it more likely to happen. Ultimately, though, it is as much the responsibility of your team members as it is of the project manager. Let them know the importance of this, of them, and of the team.

After my post on Friday about building a team, the folks at Steelray Software sent me a link to a great blog post covering the subject of teams, and the different personalities in them. You really should go and read Why That Urge to Scream is Totally Valid.

So thanks to Steelray for sending me that link on Twitter. (Hey, don’t forget you can follow me on Twitter too!)

Don’t forget to send me your tips on building a team!

Last time, I talked about the importance of teams, and the importance of making sure they didn’t turn into cliques. That got me thinking about the good side of teams.

A team is really just a small community, a group of people who work together to achieve something. Now, a team at work is unlikely to be as close as other communities (which, as we have seen, is probably a good thing), but it is still a community.

Human beings like being in communities. We are social creatures. But it can be very hard to create a community deliberately, rather than having one gradually grow up. In a project, though, you want to ensure your team gels quickly.

This often means you, as the project manager, have to take steps to foster the growth of a team. Yes, this may mean talking about the dreaded team building activities.

One example I have is of the head of a department deciding the whole department should go and help out at a local nature reserve. Their job, when they arrived, was to use shears and secateurs to clear out some of the undergrowth within some woodland.

I can’t help but feel sending an entire department out into the wilds after arming them with sharp metal implements was a brave thing to do, especially as the senior management were out there with them…

However, it seems to have worked – though at least in part because the department bonded over the absurdity of the whole process!

This is where I throw it open to you – how do you go about creating a real team? What do you do to help them form a community? Any particular tips, techniques, even activities that you use?

Building a team is important, we all know that. Having a team that are happy working together, that are committed to the project and the goal, can be the difference between a successful project and one that fails. But what about when building a team goes too far?

There is a danger that a team will stop being a team, and move over into being a clique. In a business context, a team is a group of people who come together to achieve a specific goal for the benefit of the business. A clique, however, is a group of people who work together for the benefit of the group, regardless of the effect on other groups in the business, or the business as a whole.

In other words, in case 1 the team uses the group as a tool to achieve success. In case 2, the group’s existence is seen as important.

This leads to problems because the clique begins to set themselves apart from the rest of the environment they are in. They start to see the group as special, as more important than outside, as something to be defended and fought for – regardless of the wider consequences.

Now, all of this is often subconscious, but I’m sure you can recognise some of the signs – teams start to get more cliquey, they begin to disparage other areas of the business, even other people in the same area not on the same team. An adversarial and antagonistic relationship with the rest of the business develops, leading to an inevitable loss of trust on both sides of that relationship.

This is, suffice to say, not a good thing.

Yes, encourage a team to form. But be careful it doesn’t become a clique.