Team-building events provide opportunities for teams to experience, briefly, the tangible esprit de corps that is the norm among extraordinary teams. If you have been a member of an extraordinary team, you know what it feels like. And you know that it goes beyond a single event to define how everyday interactions feel among the members of the team.

This book began with a focus on the importance of relationships. Remember the story from Chapter 1 about Bernie and the diner? Team members who enjoy close relationships truly care about one another. They go the extra mile to support one another, and this caring and commitment contributes to an extraordinary team.

Members of extraordinary teams become friends—or more. As the quality of their relationships grows, they start to think and talk about the team as family. Referring to their team as family is not just a slogan, either. They mean it.

As a manager, if you want to build an extraordinary team, help your people create strong bonds. Help them get to know one another. Create opportunities for them to explore these kinds of questions:

1. What is going on in their lives outside the team?
2. What are their dreams, aspirations, and life challenges?
3. What are their interests?
4. What are their needs?
5. What are their unique gifts?

Create opportunities to socialize outside of work and invite significant others to be part of those occasions. The importance of including significant others cannot be overstated. That is what families do, right? Celebrate important events together, like graduations, personal achievements, engagements, and the birth of a child. Support one another during illness, death, and other challenging life events. Be present for the highs and the lows. Care about each other. Make frequent use of the following phrase, “How can I help?”

Quit asking people to change. Make accepting people as they are an explicit value your team shares. We all have aces and spaces. Encourage your team members to accept one another with all their strengths and all their flaws. True friends allow people to be themselves. Focus on what is right about people. Focus on how they can make their best contribution to the team. Foster a culture in which people build others up instead of looking for ways to tear others down.

If you help people build close, positive relationships, if you help them cultivate genuine friendships, the teamwork will improve. As you strive together to attain your goals, you will go through ups and downs together, and these shared experiences will deepen the relationships. If you can do this, the intangible rewards of the journey might create value for the members of your team that even exceeds the tangible rewards of accomplishing the goal.