Team Building - Top 5 Mistakes
Most large organizations have team building activities of sort. Some are formal, some informal, and some just grow naturally based on existing personal relationships. There usually are two reasons for formal team building activities, the obvious is to strengthen a team, the second is often to build morale with the organization.
Sometimes however these events or functions backfire, and when they do, my experience is that no one ever wants to admit that things didn't go as planned. Team building and conferences tend to be expensive, so the results tend to always be presented with happy pleasantries
Given that we learn from our mistakes, I am asking for your "Top 5" list of the worst team building activities or ideas that you have experienced.
Here is my list:
1. Forcing the group together from a 7 AM breakfast to an 11 PM bowling game. Most people do need some alone time.
2. Not understanding that team members should have friendly working relationships. Friendly doesn't mean friends. Close friends on the same team are almost always a mistake.
3. Imposing activities on the team. Not asking the team what they enjoy just seems incredibly obtuse.
4. Using team building as an attempt to heal a sick team. If there is conflict within a team, eating pizza and drinking beer won't solve the problem. Conflict needs to be addressed head on.
5. Using multi-day retreats to be both organizational meetings and team building events. The particular disaster in my memory was an organization that forced people to share hotel rooms to minimize the cost.
So what are your top 5 Team Building mistakes? How about a list of 5 creative and effective Team Building activities?
Comments are always welcome.....
Good Answers (6)
Jerome J.
Founder - Jewell Consulting Group - Strategic Advisor
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In my opinion, the biggest mistake in team-building is that organizations commit to it without really being committed to it. By that I mean, they often have no idea of what their objectives or intended outcomes are. Too often it's something that is just "...done because..." . Ready. Fire. Aim. Result: Total waste and heightened frustration.
Team building is a strategic tool. Either use it properly or not at all.
Rob D.
Speaker, Author, Actor, Innovation Catalyst
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Hi Robert,
The top 5 mistakes in my view are:
1. Forcing athletic activities on everyone.
2. Failing to consider the preferences of introverts.
3. Making people listen to content rather than talk to each other.
4. Having the event outside work hours.
5. Encouraging attendance by spouses, partners etc.
As for creative approaches, mine is to focus on individual dreams and goals, and seeing how these can align with organizational dreams and goals. Organizations that support the individual goals of their talent reap huge rewards in terms of commitment and loyalty. Cheers.. Rob
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David G.
Helping Small Business Look in the Mirror
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Most teambuilding activities fail because there is a lack of clarity about what the activity is supposed to accomplish. There's a lot of wishful thinking around the supposed positive results to be obtained from some of these events.
But if you were to really call out the absurdity of this stuff, and to clearly demonstrate the lack of correlation, let alone cause/effect relationship, between the activity and some fanciful result, you'd probably be called a "non-team player." What irony!
If you're going to force coworkers together to socialize, then just call it that. The worst violation is taking a social event and trying to wring out some pretend "learning" from it so the sponsor can justify the cost of the food and drink.
1 - Designing an offsite to do team building and only using the leader of the team's insights for desired outcomes - not checking with the team on what they think we should "get out of the meeting."
2 - Renting a beautiful space and not building in time for people to enjoy the environment - why bother with the resort rent if you're not going to use it?
3 - Over-constructed activities that get too bogged down with instructions
4 - The leader not setting clear context about why we are meeting up front and what we hope to accomplish out of the session.
5 - Lack of leader involvement in design - they delegate to someone else on their team and then tear apart or suggest something different during the implementation.
Creative activities:
1 - Icebreaker - put a bunch of pennies on the table with a good span of different years. Ask folks to pick a penny and share a significant memory or accomplishment or event from that year.
2 - Get to know you - have folks draw a mind map of their lives (where they grew up, education, family, jobs, hobbies, other) and present to the team
3 - Run Marshall Goldsmith's exercise on what do we think it takes to be a good team - vote on where we think we are, prioritize areas that we can get biggest lift, give one-on-one feedback on how folks are showing up there, and create an action plan to care and feed for the year or set period of time.
4 - Team Launch - have new leader kick off session and then leave the room. The team then, brainstorms on the following questions: What do we know about our new leader? What do we want to know about our new leader? What do we want our leader to know about us? What obstacles will our leader run into? What advice do we have for our new leader? Leader comes back and debriefs with facilitator only and then runs through responses with whole team.
5 - Have a terrfic meal together in a memorable place and if possible - enjoy the environment together around the spot. This works great with a resort type offsite.
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Francisco L.
Quality and process improvement
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Teams cannot be built in a vacuum.
Teams need a problem to work on.
Teams have to be built from within.
Like learning to walk, talk or swim, theory and drills will only get you so far.
Building a team is best done through the actual experience.
For my list of how I do it, please follow the link below.
Fungus
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More Answers (2)
Almost all reasons I had have already been listed here.
One extra reason is when you are expected to take part in them and complete a full day of work as well, which leaves you spending extra time in office.
