The only way to make team building effective

Team building. It has become one of those buzzwords, which many of us are becoming tired of. We cringe at the thought of ropes courses, falling backward blindfolded, three-legged races, etc. Okay, sometimes they can be fun in the moment, but when these exercises end, we dismiss them as soft, a waste of time, and absolutely nothing to do with our day-to-day work with our colleagues. And we are right.

For team building to be truly effective, it must be practical and connect to our work. If it is not easily and tightly connected to “getting things done,” there will be no real building up of the team, and there will be no real difference in results.

How do we make team building practical?

Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team (that little red book) gives us a path through five key behaviours.

The first thing a leader needs to do, and the most foundational one, is to create an environment of trust. This trust isn’t based on competency or reliability but on vulnerability. Don’t get me wrong, competency is important here, but I assume that most firms hire people who are competent or can become competent with some training. For teams to be effective, team members, starting with the leader, need to be able to be open and honest with each other, without worrying about what others might think. Here, it is not so much as getting touchy-feely, but it’s about being comfortable around one another to freely share what you have on your mind for the good of the company.

Once there is trust, you can move into the second aspect of team building, which is conflict. Conflict is uncomfortable for most people, but it is essential to being able to come up with the best way forward. It is about conflict around ideas to look for the best course of action, so it is constructive. If team members don’t trust each other, and they can’t be vulnerable enough to share what they have on their minds, they will most likely hold back contributions that could help the team greatly.

Commitment. This is the third aspect of team building. If I am not able to say what I think, then there will not be healthy, constructive conflict, which means that it will be more difficult for me to buy into a decision. A member of the team might say that they agree with the idea (out of fear), but then, at least on a subconscious level, they will probably end up sabotaging the idea amongst their colleagues or in the way they work. This lack of alignment can be very costly to any organization!?

Accountability is the fourth aspect of team building. When everybody truly commits, then the team members (not just the leader!) can hold the others accountable. We all have had experience in organizations where there is no (or very little) accountability because of a lack of true commitment to a decision.

Finally, we need to look at the results of the team. A leadership team needs to look at the collective results and say “Are we succeeding in our mission as a company?” It is not enough to say “Well, my department is doing its job. We are getting results.” It is about the results of the overall organisation first.?

The wonders of a functional team go deep and long. When a team is functional, when it follows these five elements of building a team, it sets itself up for success.

Is team building enough?

At the beginning of this post, we said that it is important that team building be practical, related to the day-to-day work of the team. So these 5 elements of team building are not enough. We are just getting started, and this is where it gets exciting…

When a team embraces the five behaviours of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and attention to results, when it embraces this way of working as a team, then we can move on to the next step: ensuring that there is a forensic clarity around the answers to 6 simple, yet fundamental questions, as outlined in Lencioni’s The Advantage. What’s important here is not the perfect answer, because time is also an important factor. The essential thing is that the team can rally around the answers to the questions. The leadership team will need to sit down and answer these questions together, engaging in healthy conflict and debate, with nobody on the team holding back.

The questions are:

1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important right now?
6. Who will do what?

Why do we exist?

This is the ideal, the mission, the impact you want to make. The organization’s deepest reason for existing.

How do we behave?

What are your core values and how do you treat each other? What are those values you are willing to stick by, even when things get tough? These will inevitably reflect the culture of the organization.

What do we do?

This is probably the question that is the easiest to answer, as it relates to the business you are in.

How will we succeed?

This is what your strategy is.

What is most important right now?

Apart from the work that is essential to keep the organization going on a day-to-day basis, what is the aspect of the strategy that we all should focus on right now to ensure that the organization succeeds? What is the “battle cry” that “rallies the troops”?

Who must do what?

If everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible. There need to be names next to each concrete role, and ensuring that there aren't multiple people responsible for the same thing, otherwise responsibility is diluted.

How do you create real alignment in the rest of the organization?

Since the results of most organizations don’t depend on the leadership team alone, but on the teams that they lead, the next step is the most important: create clarity and alignment throughout the entire organization. To do this, leaders need to continuously and tirelessly repeat the answers to the 6 questions above. Every person in the organization is hearing the same thing over, and over, and over, and over again.

When everyone in the organisation knows the answer to these questions, it empowers everyone. When staff know what the strategy of the company is, when they come up with ideas, they can first check if it's in line with the strategy before proposing them. This also makes meetings much more efficient because everyone is on the same page and not pulling in different directions due to lack of clarity.

This is not something you will find on the cover of the latest business magazine, because it just seems way too simple. But this practice creates a discipline that makes teams incredibly effective, as it is helping every single employee form the criteria for how to act, and what to do in any given situation. Stephen Covey speaks about this idea in his book Principle-Centered Leadership. If there are doubts, or if there is confusion, employees will have to constantly go to their bosses, and that makes the organization inefficient. And that is totally avoidable.