Is your team building really building teams?

I recently gave a presentation about team building and team work to my business breakfast club. It was received so well that I thought I would try to get some of my thoughts down on paper and share them with you.

Team building is a bit of a strange term, especially in the events industry where any activity provider adds the name team building to their offering. Which means that in some ways it has started to mean very little.

I am regularly asked to do team building events where they want me to make it into a competition. They want me to split their staff into teams and pit them against each other, from which we can get a winning team, Hurrah! And a losing team, of which there will possibly be a person who dropped the ball, who can be our super loser. Not so great!

When we get asked to help clients with team building I never take that on face value, and always dig in a bit deeper in order to understand what problems we are actually solving. The issues we try to mitigate can vary and so must our solutions.  

·        New teams getting to know each other

·        Teams with geographical separation

·        Ensuring that teams are on the same page

·        Understanding how teams work together functionally

·        Seeking out future leaders

·        Rewarding a team for their hard work

Shared experience creates unity

Most good team events are based around a shared experience. In fact the best shared experiences are ones that push your team slightly out of their comfort zone, and include a new experience. This delivers what an old man like me calls the water cooler moment the next day when the real element of team building actually happens, although these days it actually all happens five minutes after the end of the event on Instagram, or some other social media platform. Either way, reliving the moment with each other after the event creates a sense of unity that has value in the work place.

Team work requires a shared goal

Teams are only teams in relation to what they are doing. I am a member of many teams, I run two businesses, I’m a team member of my breakfast club and I’m even a team with my wife. In each of these cases the thing that makes me part of that team is what we are trying to achieve together. Good team building activities require a clear shared goal. This is what brings the team together. They also require different aspects of the task to be completed by different people and of course you do need to see the results of your work at the end of the process.

Make that shared goal related to your business.

Bearing in mind that the shared goal is at the heart of what makes a team function, so why not make that team goal related to the business. This is especially helpful for SME’s where the sense of ownership is as important as the activity. We use workshops in these cases to get the team on board with each other and the management.

·        Branding workshops

·        Strategic planning sessions

·        Company values workshops

·        Problem solving using the sprint g method

Whilst the goal of the event is to encourage team spirit and ownership for your staff, they often deliver extra insights related to you company that can well be useful.

Testing teamwork

There are occasions where you do want to test your teams, looking for future leaders, resilience, or for those who seek to learn from mistakes. On these occasions we can use competitions, but they must be coach lead and done in conjunction with profiling using something like DISC or Belbin and with an understanding that with strengths come allowable weaknesses.

Don’t undervalue the importance of reward

Many of the team building events we do are actually rewarding a team, and so the main objective here is looking for the right idea simply to ensure that everyone in the team will enjoy it. Rather than catering to the tastes of the leadership.

In summary the most successful team building events we have run always start with an understanding of why team building could be helpful, its only then that we can actually seek to solve whatever problem we have identified.

If you have any team related issues that you would like to solve, please do get in touch. It’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about and for the price of a coffee you could identify a great event that will deliver real value to your business.