Team building has to be done at the right time. In the West, and here in New Zealand, there is a widely accepted way of looking at how teams develop and become productive. I'll paste a recent article I wrote on this below. Hope it helps!
How to get your team working like a well oiled machine.
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Getting a team to work together has been a challenge from the earliest times . When there's a project to do, you've got to bring several people together to get it done. But you're dealing with people and people don't always form into a team without some issues surfacing. So researchers study team building because often a lot of money has been invested to quickly get the team working at its best.
For the last 40 years one model of team development has been widely accepted in the West. It was first spelled out in a literature study published by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. In what was to become a seminal piece of research he said there were four stages of a team's life: forming, storming, norming and performing.
Tuckman's conclusion seems to have a ring of truth about it, as researchers since then have widely agreed that when a team forms its members will first want to find out about the others, will need to adjust to them, will quite possibly have conflicts, and may eventually become harmonious and productive.
Dr Tuckman named the first stage "Forming"
In Stage One the members try to find out what the others are like, and discover what's expected of them as people and group members, by pushing the boundaries. This is not a time for innovation, and members generally just do what the team has always done and get help from other members.
Tuckman said that groups then entered stage two, the Storming.
Perfect name for this time of fighting when team members resist being told what to do by the others on the team.
But then stage three begins to unfold, Tuckman said, calling it the Norming stage.
This is a time of talking and telling the others how they feel and think. The group becomes a cohesive unit. New norms and standards are agreed.
And this makes possible the Performing stage in Tuckman's sequence.
It's a dream time for the team's managers. Everyone understands the others and now it's easy and natural to work in harness with the others. Members work together to get jobs completed, to the extent of doing work for the others where that's beneficial. The team leader will be unchallenged and members look out for each other's interests.
Now, Tuckman didn't stop here. He thought about his four stages. A few years later he inserted a stage five and of course there were always going to be rival researchers who debated and refined his paper. But in spite of this, Tuckman's clear outline of the findings of his day, and his appealing labels, have lasted the distance and right up until now are the best explanation of team work that we have.