How “Team Building” Activities Help and Hurt People and Teams
Leadership Tip Number Nineteen
Dan, a Vice President, worries that his teams work more as individuals than as teams. He’s a physically active guy and decided that teams can choose from these activities: a zip line course, a hike up and down a local mountain, or an escape room. But when he suggests these ideas to one of his directors, Terry, she objects.
“Do you see these crutches?” Terry asks.
“Of course,” Dan says. “But you’ll be off them soon, right?”
“In another six weeks,” Terry says. “And then I’ll need physical therapy to get back all the strength I lost. You deliberately created activities that exclude me — and other not-quite-fully-abled people. I’m not sure how I feel yet, but they might feel it as discrimination.”
Dan’s mouth drops open.
Terry isn’t done. “Worse, you didn’t allow us to choose the team building we want. You decided for us. Is that really what you want?”
Dan starts to talk. “I can fix that.”
Terry holds up her hand. “I’m not done. You’ve totally forgotten this one fact: Our work does not depend on how well people act physically. Our work depends on how well we act together to solve product issues for our customers. Physical team building does not affect that collaboration at all. It might make you feel better, but it sure doesn’t make anyone else feel better.”
Dan shakes his head. “I just want us to work better together at all levels.”
Terry says “Then let’s have a different conversation about what we need for team building and how we’ll do it.”
Stop Physical Team Building: It’s Incongruent with Knowledge Work
Let’s consider what we need for team building: to balance the self, the other, and the context to collaborate better.
The more we collaborate as teams, regardless of the “level” of the people doing the work, the more effective we can be. However, physical team building rarely has any effect on creating collaborative teams. Those activities might be fun for able-bodied people. However, here are results I’ve seen with physical “team building” activities:
- Cliques. Some teams create cliques based on the people who succeed physically and those who don’t. (Remember being picked for physical-education teams back in school? Yeah. Same exact dynamic.) Those cliques then ignore some supposed team members.
- Alienation. The people who are not as physically capable (for any reason) often feel a drop in self-esteem.
- Anger. For whatever reason, people who don’t appreciate physical activities get angry with the situation. (I do.) When that happens, we are not in a good state for collaborating with other people.
Too often, physical “team building” creates incongruence. The physical activities inflict emotional pain — and other possible hurts — on people and teams.
But, you have a very easy way to build collaboration “into” teams at work to help the teams. Do the work — and create and refine the culture as you do.
Build Effective Teams: How to Empower the People Doing the Work
So what do we need to do to build collaborative teams? In my experience, it’s about the environment at work.
Build Teams with the Team’s Work
When teams decide and refine how to work together, they can become a collaborative team, at any level. You might discover the team can’t collaborate because they don’t have a common goal. Fix that first. If everyone is off on their own goals, they cannot work together as a team.
But let’s circle back to the start and address the manager’s role in team building.
Delegate Decisions
Dan noticed a problem. Good. Without discussing what he saw with the teams, he decided what to do. Why did he not delegate this decision to each and every team?
In Practical Ways to Manage Yourself, I suggested managers consider delegating all of these items to the team:
- Project practices (how to organize)
- Work practices (how to do the daily work)
- Technical practices (how to create excellence in the work)
When Dan decided for the team — especially the management team — he did not delegate the “project” or work practices. (Management teams might not have projects, as such.)
While Dan created an environment that supported Terry’s feedback, he forgot about the culture for the entire organization.
Managers create and refine the culture—the environment in which people work. Part of that culture is trust and psychological safety. When he decides for other people and teams, he reduces trust and psychological safety. Exactly what he does not want to do.
Create the Environment
Too many team-building activities harm people and teams. Instead, help your teams with a congruent approach to team building.
As a manager:
- Explain what you see to the team in question.
- Ask how you can support any experiments.
- Make sure you clarify their one, single, overarching goal.
- Clarify that they understand how to offer and receive feedback with each other.
- If they have not yet defined their values, ask them to do so.
- Reward flow efficiency actions, not resource efficiency.
No one needs potentially harmful physical activities to build teams. You can do a better job to help and support those teams when teams work on the work together. That means that managers go “meta”—work on the environment— that allows teams to do their best work.
This article is a part of the series of leadership tips originally published on the author’s website on April 13, 2022.
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