Traditions

The above are passive, even somewhat defensive approaches that will nonetheless lay the groundwork for more active team building. Let's start by considering a traditional and widely misused team-building tool: the meeting.

A good meeting for an IT department is almost like football strategizing (down to a whiteboard covered with arrows and squiggles). It should be short and broad, covering only those things that everyone needs to be aware of, and not bogging down in details. The more specific the team, the more detailed the meeting can be. If you're running a pure programming group, meetings can get into the minutiae of coding standards, complete with heated debates.

The main thing is to keep the meeting at the level of those who are attending: Don't bog down your hardware guys with discussions on indentation and don't burden your programmers with the latest computer installation issues.

A list of all the things one can do wrong in a meeting - which should be one of the most basic and effective tools in your team-building chest - could fill a book. I'm only going to point out one major error here because I see it so often: Do not berate your crew, either singly or en masse. The only time I've ever seen or heard of that working is in military and quasi-military situations. Meetings should be more like pep rallies.

Besides the meeting, other traditional forms of socializing, like the potluck, can also work - especially if limited to IT and a few sympathetic co-workers. This, again, isn't necessarily specific to IT: A company-wide potluck for even a small company of 50 people can be a big deal, where one for a five- to 10-person department is more casual and intimate. My current team sometimes augments the occasional potluck with a movie showing, the selection of which is often hotly debated. The movie itself isn't really all that important (though it's always something rather politically incorrect), but the debate is, as is the shared experience of having seen the film together (no matter how many times you've seen it before).