While some things can be done by yourself alone, for most of the complex work that a project needs will put you in search for team members who can help you out.
In youth work and voluntary work, teams emerge in a different way; it can happen that a project or an activity is a product of a small group of friends that want to change
something in the society which already makes a team, or a starting team. It can also be that you alone came up with an idea and are pitching the concept to your friends, your colleagues and volunteers at the youth club, or people you might not even know in school, on the streets or café bars.
Once you have two of these random people signed to support
your project you’ve got yourself a team.
However, in some cases you might need to go beyond the initial few that registered for the idea of the project at the very beginning. And in most of the cases when you work with other volunteers as part of your project or activity, you will need to consider the core concepts of teambuilding and
group dynamics in order to make the whole thing work well.
So here are some things to consider related to teams and
team building in order to achieve best results in a voluntary
engagement. Start with accepting a person as an equal team member with all his or her strengths and weaknesses. The process of establishing, building and developing an organization of a project is influenced positively by good interpersonal relations among members and their eagerness to engage in something new. To have an organization functioning effectively and professionally, a good social climate among its members and their motivation is not enough. It is essential that the members of the organization work as a team, and that they are capable of making effective decisions and running the organization efficiently.
A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose and an approach for which they hold themselves mutually
accountable. This allows them to accomplish more than they would be able to do individually, not sharing one vision. There are many reasons for using the teams in the everyday work of an organisation or on a project. Some of them are related
to the work results the team produces (more effective work, results and structures, time saving, more creative approaches, methodologies and ideas), while others are connected to the interaction with other people (building bonds among people, stronger sense of belonging). Some of the benefits
are related to individual development within a team (stronger personal development, faster acquirement of new knowledge, skills and experiences).
Ideally, a team consists of competent people who have complementary skills that can effectively answer to the needs of the assignment. However, the reality in youth work is
often different.
Teams can consist of people with different
experience levels and different motivations for belonging to the team and they often include a mixture of paid staff and volunteers, full time and part time involved people. They can include both young and old, both competent and less competent. It can be difficult to work within this kind of team, but it can also be beneficial for the individual.
Sometimes even the
inexperienced or incompetent team members can contribute much to the teamwork by introducing a different point of view, and they can surely learn a lot during the teamwork.
Also, for you as a team leader, it is a great learning path to understand how to best work with differently capable people and to stretch your patience. Thus, the organization can benefit more from them in the end. One great characteristic of teamwork is that it enables synchronisation of the activities done by a variety of people, who supplement each other in dealing with different tasks.
In order to foster good teamwork, it is important to ensure
a high level of trust and commitment among the team members and to encourage empathy, fairness, honesty, respect and sharing among them. The procedures have to be clear and roles of each team member should be well defined, so that everyone knows what is expected of him or her and what they can expect from the others. If the roles are not well defined and everyone becomes more or less responsible for everything, people are likely to rely on others to complete
certain tasks. This leads to some of the unpopular tasks being neglected or not completed at all. A good example of being clear (or unclear) and having well-defined roles is the next quotation:
“There was an important task to be done, and Everybody was certain that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody was annoyed about this, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody would not do it. Ultimately, Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done...”
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