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When a team in an organizational development context embarks upon a process of self-assessment in order to gauge its own effectiveness and thereby improve performance, it can be argued that it is engaging in team building, although this may be considered a narrow definition.

The process of team building includes, (a) clarifying the goal, and building ownership across the team and (b)identifying the inhibitors to teamwork and removing or overcoming them, or if they cannot be removed, mitigating their negative effect on the team.

To assess itself, a team seeks feedback to find out both:

• its current strengths as a team
• its current weaknesses

To improve its current performance, a team uses the feedback from the team assessment in order to:

• identify any gap between the desired state and the actual state
• design a gap-closure strategy

SI Team Coordinator