Team-building

An example of team-building is the Dreamteams of Delft University of Technology. Dreamteams are teams of students from different faculties, who participate in (international) student competitions. The name is derived from the location, where most of the teams are housed: the D:Dream hall, situated on our campus. In this hall, all teams have their offices and workshops to design and construct the cars, boats, or other machines that they will compete with.

Several Dreamteams have been victorious but let’s zoom in into the Forze team  that consists of approximately 40 students from different faculties of the TU Delft. The team constructs and races a hydrogen powered fuel cell kart in a competition called Formula Zero that is aimed to promote sustainable mobility. Aside from racing and building the hydrogen kart, the team is also concerned with organizing and attending fairs and venues to raise publicity for both the team and sustainable mobility in general. In 2008, the Forze team won the world’s first hydrogen race. Currently, the team is building its second hydrogen racing vehicle, aiming to prolong its current title as world champion.

You can imagine how important it is to get Dreamteam members to cooperate effectively. The teams need functional diversity for a successful performance. Talented students with different individual abilities need to cooperate to win the competition. Not only students from different engineering backgrounds (technology, design, modelling), but also students who are good at public relations, or those who have racing talent. Pooling these individual abilities can maximize the performance of the team. However, if the team members are not aware of the talents of the others, if they do not trust each other or have not learned how to coordinate, then their individual talents are worthless. Their collective power would not be realised.  To make sure that team members know and trust each other and learn how to coordinate their talents, team-building is necessary.

Literature suggests that team-building can benefit from clear group goals and structured work processes. This seems to contradict with what is covered in detail in the chapters on leadership in networks. There it was stated that although a project approach might fit an engineering mindset, it is not always useful.