Team Identity

Think about the teams you've worked with in the past. How many of them have been really great experiences that you enjoyed waking up to every morning? How many of them were terrible and you couldn't wait for it all to end? Have you ever worked with a group and thought, That was amazing – I wish it could have gone on forever! If so, what were the things that made working with that team so amazing?

Team identity, morale, and cohesion are all linked and are critical for building high-performing teams. They are all a state of mind, meaning the formula for creating awesome teams is a bit more abstract and a lot less formal. You cannot force a team to have high cohesion just by slapping people together, by adding one-part outgoing individuals and two parts hard-working individuals! It must form more organically than this.

Individual team identity can have an infectious enthusiasm and spread to other teams in the organization. When there is a level...