Team Building Programs Rarely Produce the Intended Results:
Here's How You Can Make Them Work
(Originally published in the Hudson Valley Business Journal - May 23, 2007)
Early in my consulting career I made the mistake of encouraging clients who wanted to improve teamwork, communication and morale to hold off-site teambuilding events. The hope was that the camaraderie the event would create would transfer back to the workplace in improved teamwork and communication. This approach rarely, if ever, works.
This is not to say that these off-site teambuilding activities have no value, it's just that they never generate the intended results business leaders hope for. Business leaders who want to improve communication and teamwork must understand that these activities are great for building camaraderie among employees, providing a physical release for workplace stress, giving employees an opportunity to have fun together and get to know each other better in a different setting than usual.
Those outcomes do have residual benefits but improving communication and teamwork back at the workplace is not among them and many times can have an adverse affect on workplace morale.
The reason is many times business owners use these activities as a façade to show they are trying to do things to improve morale and the workplace atmosphere. Unfortunately employees usually always see through this approach and morale fails to improve and many times worsens.
One of the reasons for this challenge is that the activities at these events rarely have direct application to real life workplace situations. Although metaphorically they teach a teamwork or leadership lesson few facilities are adept enough to effectively debrief the activity in a way that effectively translates back to the workplace.
The other challenge even if everything with the event does relate and transfer back to the workplace, the environment at the workplace is rarely designed to support teamwork, communications and a sharing of resources.
What I've found in attempting to work with teams in this manner is that at the workplace there is still a lack of trust between team members, a mindset of scarcity of resources, fear and uncertainty about the future, and real and imagined job security issues, and a that all cloud the ability of team members to openly communicate and work together as an effective team.
Additionally, rarely are the individual members who are being asked to work better as a team compensated, as a real team should. As I wrote in my previous column in February about how businesses can create a 'Championship Team,' individuals participating on real athletic teams are compensated and rewarded for achieving team related results, even though they may also be receiving significantly individualized compensation. Usually individuals who are asked to share resources and achieve a common goal in a regular business setting are only compensated as individuals regardless of their work as part of the team; therefore there is little incentive to work in a different manner to support the team effort.
In a project I was working on when I first started my consulting practice a few years ago we unsuccessfully brought the managers of six different departments together to focus their attitudes towards sharing resources and communicate more effectively as a team. We worked together for eight weeks, but because the leadership of the firm was unwilling to address the core issues surrounding the lack of cohesiveness and sharing between department heads, the project did not come close to achieving its desired results.
I learned a lot from that project and now would never even suggest doing a teambuilding effort unless the leadership of the company was willing to invest in a sound infrastructure that supported the team approach. To ensure your teambuilding initiative achieves its desired results be sure to answer these questions before you start:
- Why do we want/need to have more/better teamwork?
- What is the ultimate end result we want the more/better teamwork to achieve for our business?
- If we did have it, what would it look like? How would things be functioning differently/better than at present?
- What's in it for the individual employees of each department or the department heads to function more effectively as a team?
- How can we create incentives so that everyone wins as the teamwork improves?
- Is improving teamwork a necessity? Could we achieve the same or similar results in a different way?
If after answering the above questions, you decide to hold an off-site teambuilding event, be sure each activity has a purpose and is specifically associated to real issues your team is facing. This will ensure you find breakthrough solutions to take back and apply to actual workplace situations.