The Importance of Deliberate Team Building: A Project-Focused Competence-Based Approach

Strong teams do not happen by chance. Putting together a group of highly skilled individuals will not necessarily result in a top performing team. Team building can have lasting, positive, and measurable effects on team performance. However, it is important that you keep the activities project-focused and avoid situations that feel awkward or artificial. This paper describes how to build motivated and cohesive technical teams using a “deliberate team building” approach, which is a different way for technical managers to think about team building and describe techniques successfully employed that differ from the classic, sometimes less successful, team bonding exercises used with technical professionals.