Workforce Development
team building
BY PAULA JANE COX
If the requests that I receive for ‘’Team Building’’ are anything to go by, team building is definitely the buzz word of the era for L&D.
My first question is always:
‘’What are the issues/Challenges? What are you hoping to achieve? ‘’Answers vary, but mostly the answer alludes to ‘’the team are not getting on/are not effective’’ OR "we've tried everything, but we just can't get them to work together!"
Part of building effective teams seems to incorporate an alleged miracle solution of ‘"Team Building” but; going to play in a water park or climbing walls with no underlying strategy, just touches the surface, and if not correctly thought out, will indeed create a lack of unenthused people.
Forcing different people to ‘’get along in unison’’ in environments that cause stress to some, is not effective. Doug Floyd famously said: "You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note." To build an effective team, organizations must realise a few things first!
People are all different, they respond differently, talk, think and act differently – do not attempt to unify a team, but use the differences to create results and this requires a deeper strategic approach.
So; if basic Team Building isn't the solution, that doesn't mean there is no solution.
To understand how to get past those stumbling blocks that seem to screech out for ‘’Team Building’’, the first thing we must understand is why "Team Building" doesn't work. That understanding will lead to solutions that really do work. There are a number of reasons why team building exercises don't build teams.
First, most people dislike these exercises/events. Most level-headed people have little fortitude for going through contrived activities with people they are cynical of in the first place.
Secondly, team building often happens in a retreat-like setting - away from the office, or over a weekend. And retreats are renowned for having their effects be short-lived.
The immediate results of a retreat may be that you are sitting around a dinner table with your compulsory new friends and feeling like anything is possible. But come Sunday when you face normal workloads, very little will has really changed.
So, the question, as always, needs to be ‘’what exactly is wrong’’?
Usually a lack of aligned leadership, direction, policy, vision, values; or basic articulated direction.
What team building tries to do is to change the behaviours of the team (the symptoms) without getting to the root cause of why those behaviours exist in the first place (the complaint). By simply attempting to replace a "bad behaviour" with a "good behaviour," we create a fleeting fix for the symptoms, but the complaint continues to exist. And that can only mean that at some point, symptoms will re-emerge.
So if Team Building isn't the answer, What is the answer?
The answer comes from a combination of awareness and the willingness to get to the bottom of what's really going on. Awareness that when people behave badly, we can't just tell them to stop, and can't just teach them to change to chosen, text book "good" behaviours.
28 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST FEB 2014
does not work!