PREFACE

Teambuilding has existed for decades, with the earliest known teambuilding programs dating back to the 1950s. However, it has become more prevalent in recent years due to the changing nature of work and the increasing emphasis on collaboration and communication in the workplace.

In the past, work was often done in a more hierarchical structure, with clear lines of authority and a focus on individual achievement. However, as the business world has become more competitive and fast-paced, companies have realized the benefits of having teams of employees who work together effectively. This has led to a greater said emphasis on teambuilding as a way to improve communication, collaboration, and overall productivity.

Additionally, technology and remote work have made it easier for teams to communicate but also harder to build trust and cohesion, which is another reason why teambuilding activities are seen as even more important.

With over 20 years experience in professional teambuilding, training, and workshops for world leading companies, we have observed that teambuilding only really addresses part of the issues that modern-day organizations wish to tackle. For this reason, for the remainder of the book we will migrate from the traditional notion of teambuilding to an understanding of teamwork in order to incorporate the many other tools that can be utilized when forming a great working team.

Although, usually we provide these ideas as products and services to our clients, we feel that humanity can greatly evolve if these practices can be made available to all, but especially graduate students and managers.

In recent years, students have begun to realize that what they learned in class has failed to teach important skills such as how money is created and what money is. And this allowed us to realize, that although nearly everything currently relies on people working together in teams, there is a very limited focus on this. Currently, when students leave university, or employees get promoted to managers, though they may have the needed professional skills for the job, they remain unfamiliar in how to work in a team, or manage a team to maximize each participants potential.

For this reason, we decided to create this book to compile our learned knowledge to share with others for practical purposes. Due to the audience and the fact this topic is generally not addressed in educational institutions, it is written in two styles; partly non-fiction and partly textbook. The reasons for what makes a good working team are given in non-fiction style for easy reading and interesting anecdotes, but conclusions and side notes are provided for those who already have experience in this field so they can use it as a reminder, a way to teach others, or to quickly find the sections in which they have not yet the knowledge or wish to have a deeper understanding or practical examples.

Though this text was created for a print version, much of it is made public on howtoteamwork.com and practical facilitation for teambuilding, teamwork, and other training activities can be found at proteambuildingasia.com.

As language changes frequently, especially since the internet and the rate of change in humanities’ understanding of ourselves, remember to continue to check the glossary to better understand the intended concepts correctly.