Improving Teamwork through Team Building Exercises using Biorhythms
The Crossing. A Place where people meet
Building on the my research in Biorhythms and Team Dynamics, I would now like to explain how this knowledge can be used in Team Building Exercises. Before you can start, you need to determine what biorhythmic compatibilities will have an effect on teamwork, and your team's productivity. Is this a team that needs to connect intellectually? Or is physical compatibility more important. Maybe emotional. Depending on what skills they use to work as a team, each compatiblity will have a different importance to improving teamwork.
If you are creating a new team, the best way is to take the term literally, i.e. to build a team. In order to do so, you look at a group of potential people that could serve as team members, and comparing their biorhythms to see who is compatible with whom. One possible approach is to simply assemble the team from the largest group of compatible members. If that is not possible because of people that need to be on the team, then it is very important that those have-to-have people have people who they are compatible with, to make sure these people will not be alienated from the rest of the team. One option is to pick those matching people to be identical to the have-to-have person or persons, for maximum compatibility. Another approach is to select one or more other members that are somewhat compatible with the have-to-have person, and somewhat compatible with the rest of the team. In this case, this person would serve as a 'bridge', a person that can relate to your have-to-have person as well as the rest of the team, and can serve as a mediator or facilitator between these two groups.
If you are working with an existing team of people, where the team is split into fractions that don't communicate well, or don't get along, another approach of a team building exercise is to introduce one more members to the team that serve as the 'bridge' between the two groups. Depending on how far the two groups are apart, you might have to introduce two or three new members. The closer the new member is to each team, the better they will be able to communicate with that team. Then the bridges are hopefully close enough together to be able to communicate with each other, thereby allowing information to flow between the outer extremes.
Another possible team building exercise to improve teamwork would involve actually restructuring the team an removing some members. If a biorhythmic evaluation of the team concludes that there is one or more team members that are strongly incompatible with the rest of the team, and these are not have-to-have individuals, it might be advisable to remove these people from the team. There are several logical reasons for this: It could be that these people are a disturbance to the harmony within the team, thereby negatively affecting productivity. What is also very likely is that the rest of the team spends a lot of time explaining concepts to this member, simply because he or she does not naturally follow the thinking of the rest of the team. So instead of having the creativity of the individual team members enhance each other and thereby magnifying each other like harmonious waves, they cancel each other out. All of the energies are spent explaining to or convincing the other side of a concept, that no actually useful work is accomplished. This will affect team productivity, grind nerves, and lead to stress within the team. Not a good way to promote teamwork, and definitely not a good team building exercise.
Disclaimer: This information is based on private research, and should not
be used in place of professional advice. The Author is not a trained counsellor, psychologist,
doctor, or any other type of researcher. You act on this advice at your own risk.
Copyright@2000-2004, Juergen Amft, All rights reserved
