Why High Performance Teams, Real Teams, Brilliant Teamwork and Effective Team Building are as Rare as the Halley’s Comet in 90% of the Organisations.

Although most chief executive officers, board leaders, board members, top executives and heads of departments are aware of the importance of teams and how teams are central to organisational performance results, as much as 70 percent of them do not take creating and leading high performance teams that seriously. I know this from both my ongoing research in teams, team building and the performance of teams and also from my years of involvement in developing and facilitating team building programs.

Many companies and organisations never do any kind of team building work even very simple elementary things like a half-day session of bringing together talking about building some kind of teamness.

Using a Tactical Approach to Team Building Instead of Using a Strategic Approach

The summary of team-building mistakes is that way too many organisations approach team-building tactically instead of strategically. Second, many who are in charge of organisational performance and teams are not consciously aware that their approach to team building is tactical rather than strategic and they cannot fix this problem until they become aware of, know and understand the difference between a tactical approach and a strategic approach to team building. Even when they become aware of the need to know the difference between the strategic tactical and strategic way of building teams, many will not act on the awareness to make the changes so the status quo, mediocre way of team building will remain.?This is the reason why someone say as humans we often know what we must do; the problem is we do not do it. Apathy and stubbornness are our big vice, especially the higher we rise to levels of top management and leadership.

Having, Using a Poor Theory of Teams, Team Performance and Team Building

?Many organisations ignore the importance of theory in producing practical results. They ignore the fact that theory is the mother of practice and that theory informs practice. Can you answer the following questions?

1.??????What do you think about teams?

2.??????How much do you know about teams

3.??????What do you know about teams?

4.??????What do you know about yourself in terms of teams

5.??????What do you think about teamwork?

6.??????What do you think about teamwork in your organisation?

7.??????What do you think about yourself in terms of team working?

8.??????What do you think about team building?

9.??????What do you know about team-building?

10.??What do you think about yourself in terms of team building

11.??How much time per year do you commit to team building?

12.??How exactly do you invest your time in team building?

13.??How much money and other resources do you invest in team-building?

14.??Do you have real teams in your organisations

15.??What makes you think that what you call teams are real teams?

Your answers to these questions as an individual or organisations will reveal your current theory of teams and teamwork and will indicate how well you are currently doing in the area of teams, teawork and team building.

Many organisatons have good team members but those team members never become real teams or they become poor to average teams because of the poor theory used in “team building” and managing teamwork. You must change your theory of teams in order to start producing real teams and produce dramatically higher levels of team performance and team results. This is not just about investing more time and resources in teambuilding but doing it the right way.

Random Ad-hoc, Team Building Events Instead of a Team Building Program

Most of those that do some kind of team-building effort do it randomly and in an ad-hoc fashion and are in the form of a half day to two and half days off-site event. Such event are typically initiated by the human resources department and most work very hard to sell the idea to their bosses and chief executive officers. This is strange and surprising because in normal situations, it is the leaders who must make sure team building is taking place and insist on it. Second, many decision-makers including board leaders and chief executive officers insist on investing as little as possible in terms of financial resources and time into the team-building event. These same leaders and decision-makers expect extraordinary performance from the same people whom they starve of serious training, education and development.

I have also noticed that in most cases, people who initiate and organise these team-building events often have no idea what they want the team-building event to accomplish. They invite team building facilitators and ask the facilitators what they have to offer instead of inviting the team building facilitators and providing them with a brief of what they want to accomplish by the team building. In other words, many team-building events are activity-based instead of results-based. This is the second weakness of traditional team-building events after being ad-hoc.

Third, many so-called team-building events are not real team-building events but some kind of organiszation-building events. I say so because participants for the team building sessions are drawn from all over the organisation including many participants who never work together as a team on a day-to-day basis and who never at any time form a team. There are very few real team-building events that are focused on people who interact directly towards producing the same output.

Such team building events, when done well, do make a difference; they are 1000 times better than those who never do any team-building at all, but they are not enough to produce high-performance organisations. Producing high-performance teams requires a serious process and well-structured programs beyond these few-hours and few-days events.

Not Understanding the Return on Investment of Team Building

Some board leaders, chief executives and their top teams never bother to invest in understanding the numbers associated with activities such as training, education and development, attending seminars and workshops and developing and running proper team building and organisational performance management programs. Because they have no clear picture of the relative differences in terms of results and financials between poor, mediocre and high performance organisations and teams; they treat such events as expenses and a waste of time; the reason why most of the team building work is ad-hoc, mediocre and inconsistent. Many people in charge of human resources in these companies and organisations do not have intimate knowledge of teams, their performance and the real impact of investing in team-building work on the organisations’ performance and results. Many still believe in the old-fashioned thinking that people’s performance is directly related to their academic qualifications, their experience, their talent, their salaries, and their individual motivation and initiative. This is completely false.

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?Simon Bere, 2022