Designing Team Off-sites that Work
We’ve all been there; you’re on a high-bar in an obstacle course with a spongy weapon in hand and you’re wondering “do I smash my co-worker in her face, or, do I let her win because I just want this to be over with?”. Team building all too often sucks but it doesn’t have to. Team Building could be better.
“At a previous company, I was participating in a manager-training meeting. We were divided into teams and tasked with hoisting each other through an imaginary window — basically, a rope stretched 3 feet off the ground — in an allotted time. One team had to lift an obese woman. Everyone in the room saw the struggle, and she ended up crying. Some people were kind to her, but most ignored the awkward situation and pretended it didn’t happen.” —
We Deserve Better
Today’s most valuable firms understand that in order to innovate they need teams of people to do the best work of their lives in conditions which enable them to do so.
If a highly talented team are unable to intuit the emotional needs of one another and don’t consider the psychological safety of one another as integral to their collective performance they will more than likely fail as a team.
IDEO’s recent research points to a second (there are many) contributing factor which enables teams to succeed where others don’t, purposefulness. Having a commonly understood purpose — a non-monetary motivator — aligns team action and creates a compelling reason to get up in the morning and head to work.
We know that purposeful work and psychological safety are key to creating the conditions for teams to innovate and yet we book team get-aways, off-sites and team-building sessions which do the opposite — they often lack any link back to the organisation’s purpose and undermine noble attempts at creating team cohesion by putting a diverse group of people into an environment which they may not all be comfortable with.
I was working for a health-care company that had its team-building event at a Native American casino in Southern California. The company hired an outside consultant to facilitate the event, and they were doing a great job until one of the facilitators, a white guy with blond hair and blue eyes, came onstage dressed like a Native American. Many servers working the event were Native American and were offended. Casino management stopped the event and kicked us out. — Pete Abilla
Organisers of team building sessions often start with the best intentions. They’re challenged to create an experience which is fun, unites the team in a challenge and gives team members an opportunity to get to know one another. They’re mandated by the experience’s sponsors to make it “fun” AND “collaborative”. They’re setup to fail because fun is subjective and collaborative is ambiguous.
Trust-falls aren’t fun and I’m not convinced shooting paintballs at colleagues has any practical application when brought back to the work.
Make Your Next Team Building Session Count
A change in setting and perspective could encourage your team to work cohesively and could encourage team members to show more empathy for one another but unlocking the potential of your team requires deliberate design.
Here are a few questions you might seek to answer before you commit to spending your organisation’s team building budget.
What is the team currently working toward and how could the team building session address ways to improve the productivity of the team?
How can we encourage the team participating to contribute to the design of the experience?
No-one likes to stick their necks out in a group so how might we create a way to pass feedback on to the event’s organisers in a way that would not compromise an individual’s feeling of emotional or physical wellbeing.
- Does the team building session contribute to a better understanding of why we work together as a team?
- How can the team-building session complement the development of the team’s capabilities?
- Can the team-building session create an opportunity for leaders to emerge in the group?
- Can the team-building session be used as an opportunity to surface the capabilities of team members?
- Can the session be used as a chance to foster a deeper understanding of the purpose and of the people they serve as a team?
- Is the outcome and agenda of the team building session clear to everyone going?
- Can learning a new skill, or improving the capabilities of team members be blended into the team building session?
- How can we extend the learning and experience from the team-building session so that the learning is sustained long after the session is done and that the impact directly contributes to improving the work the team conducts?
By no means an exhaustive list so please add your own in the comment form below. We can’t have any one walking across coals now can we?
