Thoughts on Effective Team Building

Do group exercises help build camaraderie in your unit?

CCLKOW is a weekly conversation on military affairs jointly hosted by the Center for Company-Level Leaders (CCL) at the US Military Academy at West Point and the Kings of War (KOW), a blog of the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the US Army or the Department of Defense. Read the post and join the discussion on Twitter #CCLKOW.

Anyone who has ever been to a basic-level Army education system school knows that the Army has a mild infatuation with team building exercises. Usually dubbed something like a “leader’s reaction course,” the Army puts groups through cognitive-based problem sets that are meant to enhance teamwork and build cohesion. These exercises are infrequently done at the unit level and are saved for the schoolhouse environment. Nevertheless, they’ve found their way onto many of the major bases and serve as a reminder of the importance of team building in Army units.

There are competing reports about the effectiveness of such team building exercises. Known very well among the civilian sector as “ROPES” courses, these team building exercises are considered by many in the field to be an excellent source of providing a way to build relationships among group members (Gillis 129). I’m not so sure that I’d agree with that though and tend to believe that such leader reaction courses are a cheesy way to promote team building and don’t really have a lasting impact on leadership cohesion. let’s face it, every time your organization is facing dissonance, the answer isn’t to take them into the woods and execute trust falls until everyone is feeling better about themselves. Although these courses have their roots in the military in the 1940s (Gillis 112), I’m more of a progressive thinker and tend to agree with an article from the December 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review.

In this month’s Harvard Business Review, there’s an article written by author Anders Wenngren that suggests that true team building occurs in the cafeteria. Wenngren suggests that the roots of sharing a meal is a personal affair that dates back to the “primal behavior” days when sharing a meal was a sign of intimacy. A second example used by the author was how firefighters purposefully share meals together in order to build team cohesion. They even went as far as to say that some firefighters would eat a meal at home and help cook and eat a meal once they got to the firehouse with their colleagues. The process of purchasing the food, cooking, cleaning, and enjoying the meal together was cited as a key theme for enhancing their organizational effectiveness (Wenngren). The examples cited by Wenngren and the data supporting it provide an interesting perspective on ways to enhance team effectiveness that may not be common thinking. So what would this look like in the military? Platoon-level outings to lunch once a quarter or even a potluck in the motor pool could be easy low-cost ways for you to capitalize on the research that supports sharing meals to increase team effectiveness and Soldier cohesion.

With the data competing with each other and one of the principles of mission command being to “build cohesive teams through mutual trust” (ADRP 6–0 Pg 1–3), this caused us at CCL to want to ask the question in this week’s #CCLKOW. So here’s what we’re wondering:

  1. Do you believe that team building events such as the Leader’s Reaction Course are an effective way to enhance your unit’s effectiveness?
  2. Is sharing a meal between squad, platoon, company-level units a more or less effective way to build cohesive teams?
  3. What are some ways that you’ve used to build unit cohesion in your own formations? What made them so effective?

References

Gillis, H. L., & Sppelman, E. (2008). Are Challenge (Ropes) Courses an Effective Tool? A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Experiential Education, 31(2), 111–135.

United States (2012). Mission Command, Army Doctrine Reference Publication 6–0, Washington, DC: Headquarters, Dept. of the Army.

Wenngren, A. (2015). “Team Building in the Cafeteria”. Harvard Business Review. Dec 2015. Web. 20 Dec 2015. <https://hbr.org>.