Team Building
Companies put a lot of effort into team building.
They spend thousands on booking events and locations to foster team spirit. Weekends away, surviving in the wilderness, setting tasks to pass to create a better understanding of teamwork.
Thing is, it’s very often a false economy. Team building exercises like this can work, but often feel like role-playing exercises – they’re not real-life examples.
Instead of sending people away to build a team, why not build it from the inside on recognizable terrain?
Open up the silos; ask for, and then listen to, ideas and suggestions; encourage and recognize greatness; make everyone equal.
Want to build a great team? Make the team great to begin with.
3 Responses to “Team Building”
Interesting idea Danny. In my experience I would opt to do both: build from within (in familiar territory) and off-site. Sometimes you just need to get people out of their comfort zones and away, to really break down the silos. I am not a big fan of all the wilderness games outdoors (though, some are fun), but admit I am one of those reluctant off site team building participants who has been pleasantly surprised at the outcome. To answer the comment above, I have found success in silo busting by teaming up colleagues from cross functional teams, diff. departments, and even diff. brands within a corp. to work on special projects that could benefit the corporation. It’s been quite successful (and something that could be managed from bottom up), and another way to forge new relationships and bust divisions without having to leave town.
This is an interesting take on this. I used to do quite a bit of team building (which included some of the Fortune 500 organizations) which almost always involved the outdoors, either rock climbing, the ropes course or kayaking. I always felt like these activities were an ethical way to place a group into a challenging situation to get a snap shot of their current reality- since problem solving skills are generally considered transferable skills, so how you problem solve in the wilderness likely resembles the approach used in the board room. Having said that, this experiential approach to team building generally falls short because the experiential learning cycle isn’t completed. They experience the “what” then debrief the “so what” but rarely do they carve out a plan for the “now what” or how to take what was learned from the activity and apply it to real life work situations and get group buy in that they commit to working on the issues identified. Transfer of training continues to be a debate in this industry because of ROI. Research shows that transfer is more likely to occur when management leads the way- unfortunately, people get lazy and don’t always follow through or worse yet they go to these events looking for a band aid or a reason to say “see, this team can’t be fixed.” Having said all of this, I like this thinking- “Instead of sending people away to build a team, why not build it from the inside on recognizable terrain?Open up the silos; ask for, and then listen to, ideas and suggestions; encourage and recognize greatness; make everyone equal.”My question is how do you build from the inside? How do you get people to open up on company terrain without concerns for hurt feelings, stepping on toes etc. How do you transfer these discussions to real life plans of implementation?