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Many businesses large or small are always looking for ways to improve the bottom line. A sure fire way to do this is ensure that you have a finely tuned high functioning team working for you or the business. So it goes without saying that our company gets quite a lot of requests to do “team building”. However for every request we get to do a team building session, about half the requests eventually turn into something different, and in the end, quite a lot of other changes take place before we even end up doing “team building”.
It is because of this that I always ask the client this simple question: “why do you want to do some teambuilding”. Out of the variety of different answers that I get to this question, there is a common theme or belief that a day of team building will have a positive outcome and create long term value for the team and the business. Where does this belief come from? Interesting to note that if you Google “team building”, in about 0.48 seconds you will get 120,000,000 results. Obviously there is a belief that team building produces bottom line results or at least there is a lot of information out there that would tell you this.
And I would agree that there is a time and a place where a great day of team building will have a very positive impact on the team and carry over to the bottom line. But at the same time, I can almost guarantee you that pending why someone wants team building, chances are it is not going to achieve the results they were looking for.
Here is my simple rule of thumb when it comes to whether or not I think team building is the right thing to do. If the team is all ready a good or a great team and all members, including the leader want the opportunity to get to know each other beyond their regular work routine (and have fun doing it) and looks at ways to become even better, then I think team building is a great option. The essence of team building is to build trust. The more you trust your team, the more you are apt to work with them and go that extra mile to ensure success. As a leader it is your to job to build, create or provide opportunities for trust to grow.
Team building for the most part is not really an option when there is little no trust between team members, including the leader. Ongoing conflict, high turnover rate, dislike or mistrust between the leader and the team, poor communication, low productivity and unhappy customers are all examples of a team with little or no trust.
This leads back to the start of my article. If you have great team lets have some fun and spend a great day doing some teambuilding where it will create value for the team and the business. On the other hand, if you are experiencing a lot issues with your team, then know that chances are you are going to have to invest a bit more time and energy then a day of team building to get everyone back on track.
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Shane Jensen, MA, ACC, CEC
Questions, comments, insight? - Send me an email:
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www.newquestcc.com
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