??to awks holiday crafts and boozing       ??to purpose-driven team-building
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter, August 18, 2015 ''Awkward' Showrunners'

??to awks holiday crafts and boozing ??to purpose-driven team-building

A couple of years ago the leadership team I was part of was taken to a secret location two weeks before Christmas to take part in a team-building party.

It turned out to be another one of those painful exercises in pointless consumption that involved glass-blowing or glass-melting and then something to do with making elves out of cardboard and bits of cotton wool and googly glue-on eyes.

The glass bit was ok but the excessively long craft session was excruciating. There was wine and what felt like a lot of pressure to show that one was having FUN! Lots of FUN!

No elves were harmed in the making of this plate.

I really do appreciate the sentiment of wanting to have a fun activity where team-members can decompress and bond but the execution of these events so often falls short. The main reason is the varying definition of 'fun'. For some people, doing crafts is fun. For others (myself included), doing crafts is about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.

There's also the social element. While I'm probably at about the centre of the introvert-extrovert scale, at least a third of people show up as introverted on the Myers-Briggs scale and just aren't comfortable having to be 'on' for several hours in a large group of people. This feeling of discomfort can be exacerbated by the feeling of being judged if one is not actively demonstrating that fun, lots of FUN! is being had.

Some of this is cultural. As somebody who has spent equal parts of his life in the US and the UK, I've experienced how different cultures engage in holiday parties. While getting drunk is in no way unique to Britons, getting utterly shit-faced does seem to be a common feature of holiday parties in Britain.

I remember with a sinking feeling the first corporate Christmas party I ever attended seeing a colleague smashed out of his gourd, pole-dancing in a very provocative way and the anxious looks being exchanged - 'Should we stop him? Would that infringe on his right to act like a total nob? Is this the actual entertainment for tonight?' So painful.

Then there was the ad agency party I attended when a colleague swung a punch at our boss. Madness.

Add to this the phenomenon of jockeying to sit close to the boss at dinner and in my mind these examples are some pretty good reasons not to perpetuate the traditional holiday party/team-building. But what are the alternatives?

As bad as the experiences I've just described were for me, I've also experienced some fantastic and rewarding team-building events. The common themes among positive events seem to be:

  1. Completing a challenging task as a team. (The tightest team I've even been part of was in the military when teamwork is literally the only way for individuals to survive).
  2. A sense of purpose. Crafts are not purpose and neither is over-consumption.
Carrots, YUM!

One event that stands out is when a team I was part of volunteered at a food bank. We spent a couple of hours sorting foods for donation and shoveling two (or ten? I can't remember) full tons of frozen carrots. It was fairly grim work but afterwards we all felt really good about ourselves.

We figured out the most efficient way to process the pallets of food we had to sort through. That gave rise to more of a sense of teamwork than admiring each others' craft elves ever could.

Elves, for goodness' sake...

Listen, I'm not saying that the tight relationships that often develop in the workplace should not blossom into close friendships out in the 'real' world. They can often evolve into super drunken debauchery which I enjoy as much as the next fellow. Trying to force people into 'enjoying their team-mates' often doesn't work, however.

Teamwork really does make the dream work but it's worthwhile rethinking what the work is.

Krista Rime

Strategic Digital Analytics & Product Management Expert | Driving Business Growth with Data-Driven Insights | Event/Stream Data, Tag Management, SQL, Python, Data Science, ML/AI

3 年

Companies make large investments to optimize the customer experience. Analyst uncover pain points and work with product to deliver an improved experience. How successful could a company be if it took the same optimization/personalization approach when building and growing teams? Let’s use the methods that drive sales and bring them internally to deliver a great team experience.

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