Are you a team builder?

Team Building: The ability to develop and maintain relationships with others, encouraging collaboration and mutual support among the different parts of a team.

Being a team builder represents an essential element in a leading manager of the third millennium. Until a few years ago, in sports as in business, the communication between coach/manager and athlete/collaborator was such that it was much more important for the latter to follow the instructions given to them, but in recent years the situation has changed a great deal in both areas. The increase in competitiveness, the need to succeed, the demand for greater commitment and the need to take full responsibility for one’s own performance, together with the consequent breaking down of the hierarchical pyramid, has required a far greater level of participation, problem-solving competence and group cohesion than was the case years ago. This has required the leaders themselves to be cohesion promoters and to engage the people on the team in a relationship of intense collaboration geared toward success and personal development.

• Reflect on the way your team operates. Does the hierarchical structure predominantly determine the rules of behavior, or is exchange and cooperation the engine that makes your group pursue results?

The team builder must know how to help athletes identify and achieve their goals and be genuinely interested in their athletic and personal development. Although winning is important or rather as Boniperti, former president of Juventus, used to say: “Winning is not important, it’s the only thing that matters”, it is necessary to foster the development of the athlete.

The basic idea is that you need to help athletes and teammates to develop independent, creative thinking, which leads them to be individuals responsible for their choices. It is necessary to develop self-discipline and learn to manage one’s time and priorities. There will be ups and downs, obstacles along the way but in the end those who survive these particularly challenging demands or have even achieved their goals what more could they want in terms of rewarding experiences?