Team building is not a onetime activity
Several times a year, people ask me for a list of the best team activities for them to use at their next meeting. This request typically causes me to sigh. Here is my philosophy about team building.
Team building is not a onetime activity. It is a learning lifecycle which includes strategy, planning, design, development, training, and continuous care and feed.
Unfortunately, there is not a quick fix to building team environments. Having an one hour activity as a stand-alone exercise is not building community or a team culture in your organization. In fact, it may be doing the exact opposite. If people do not see outcomes or practical usage of training, they shut down and overall morale lowers. They become skeptical and disinterested in participating. They also start to sabotage the activity in order for people to stop giving them. Excuses start popping up such as “I’m too busy to play games”, etc.
You need a plan and coordinated activities as well as follow-through from top down. There need to be tie-ins to personal performance, balanced scorecards, and organizational goals and objectives. It is a tightly woven plan which weaves through everything you do and every interaction with your staff, vendors, members, and constituents.
For example, you create a team building plan for the year. Each activity or exercise works together in harmony and has a flow that builds the team, builds trust, gains personal perspective, increases productivity and quality, and creates a powerful organizational culture.
After each activity/exercise, there is a reinforcement time period which happen in small group discussions. This is where the real team building occurs because the team decides upon the practical usage of the lessons learned within their environment. This needs to be built into the design of the activity/exercise.
The measurement starts immediately – taking a baseline measurement of personnel performance, organizational morale, service quality and satisfaction metrics, and other key performance indicators – and then again about 6 months after the plan began. You then measure every year unless there is a major culture changes such as a new executive director or a significant change in direction.
This ought to be well designed in order for it not to be time-consuming to manage. This is not someone’s fulltime job. It is a job shared by all – executives and staff.
Unfortunately, there is not a quick fix to building team environments. Having an one hour activity as a stand-alone exercise is not building community or a team culture in your organization. In fact, it may be doing the exact opposite. If people do not see outcomes or practical usage of training, they shut down and overall morale lowers. They become skeptical and disinterested in participating. They also start to sabotage the activity in order for people to stop giving them. Excuses start popping up such as “I’m too busy to play games”, etc.
You need a plan and coordinated activities as well as follow-through from top down. There need to be tie-ins to personal performance, balanced scorecards, and organizational goals and objectives. It is a tightly woven plan which weaves through everything you do and every interaction with your staff, vendors, members, and constituents.
For example, you create a team building plan for the year. Each activity or exercise works together in harmony and has a flow that builds the team, builds trust, gains personal perspective, increases productivity and quality, and creates a powerful organizational culture.
After each activity/exercise, there is a reinforcement time period which happen in small group discussions. This is where the real team building occurs because the team decides upon the practical usage of the lessons learned within their environment. This needs to be built into the design of the activity/exercise.
The measurement starts immediately – taking a baseline measurement of personnel performance, organizational morale, service quality and satisfaction metrics, and other key performance indicators – and then again about 6 months after the plan began. You then measure every year unless there is a major culture changes such as a new executive director or a significant change in direction.
This ought to be well designed in order for it not to be time-consuming to manage. This is not someone’s fulltime job. It is a job shared by all – executives and staff.
Thus, one exercise is, in my opinion, useless unless part of an overall team building plan.
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