If you have any kind of team: sales team at work, football team that plays for fun, pub quiz team, you can use promotional clothing like printed T-shirts or embroidered sweatshirts to increase motivation.

The most successful teams all have the same behaviours – they are groups where each member of the team knows their own strengths and how their strengths support the general team to achieve its aims, whether they are to hit a sales target or to score more goals.

Knowing each person’s roles and special skills can be developed by showing their specialist abilities on their team clothing, so a quiz team might all wear the same embroidered sweatshirts with a cartoon mascot on them, but also have nicknames printed on the back, or a sales team might be rewarded by having a special ‘golden’ vest that is worn on dress down Friday by the person who has made the most sales in that week.

Alternatively you can encourage skills development and team thinking by dividing an already existing team in two, like the girls and boys in the popular TV series Glee, and forcing them to compete with each other as well as competing against other teams. Do this by putting one team in one colour clothing, say red polo shirts, and the other team in green. Their incentive could be that the team that scores most goals in practice gets to leave the pitch without helping tidy up, or in business the team that makes most cold calls might be rewarded with doughnuts and coffee the following Monday morning.

Make sure you mix up the mini-teams on a regular basis, so that everybody gets to know the strengths and abilities of all team members – this creates respect and understanding.