Team Building

Building a productive project team is one of the most challenging tasks most leaders will face. You're taking a group of coworkers and encouraging them to become colleagues working toward a common goal, even though they may or may not have anything in common (or even work in the same department). It gets even more exciting when your team members have different understandings of the project, its value, or the role in completing it. These templates and guidelines will help you get the right team members and ensure everyone understands how their roles and responsibilities overlap, while building camaraderie and trust.

For a more comprehensive list of team-building resources, including Burning Questions, articles, and more, see our Team-Building Know-How page. You may also want to review our templates on leadership and virtual teams.

• Responsibility Allocation Matrix
  RACI has it's place, but this Responsibility Allocation Matrix takes project responsibilities and commitments to a whole new level. Detailed and role-focused, it asks all project team members to consider their key project tasks, the inputs they need, and the outputs they expect to deliver, for a more complete look at the cross-functional dependencies in your plan.
• Task Responsibility Matrix Formats
  Formats and example contents for a team Responsibility Matrix.
• Team Roles and Responsibilities List
  This file contains formats and example contents for a Team Roles and Responsibility List.
• Project Team Organization and Assignments
  A checklist for organizing a project team.

• Fast, Effective Ramp Up of New Team Members
  You can't afford to have new team members milling around unproductively trying to figure out their project role and responsibilities. Throw them a rope—and get them productive faster—with this detailed guideline by Steve Trautman, excerpted from his book Teach What You Know: A Practical Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring.
• "Sweet" Team Building Suggestion
  A "sweet" team building case study in cookbook format. This guideline provides a how-to approach using candy and Management By Walking Around (MBWA) for team building.
• Project Team Rewards and Recognition Guideline
  Project work is serious, but it shouldn't be drudgery. Remember to include team rewards, recognition, celebration, and general hoopla in your project planning. This guideline provides ideas, suggestions, and a detailed example from one team's reward-planning activities.
• A User's Guide to Working with Me
  This quick chart helps team members communicate their most effective modes of work, including hot buttons, trust-builders, the best ways to raise and resolve conflicts, and more.