I’m happy to offer a dissenting opinion from the majority.
I’ve been around a great many ‘team-building’ groups and experiences, and my conclusion is that, like just about anything else, you get out of them what you put into them. If there are members of the group who consider themselves too ‘enlightened’ or cool or who have bad attitudes toward the experience, then–surprise!–it’s not going to be a very helpful or productive experience.
However, if every member of the group is willing to be open-minded and to commit to trying something different, then it can be a very helpful process to go through.
Of course, the value of the exercises seems to vary greatly depending upon the kind of group that is participating. It’s hard to get a bunch of office workers who know each other well and who work together every day to get much out of it because their relationships with one another are so well-established that a day or two doing team-building is not going to accomplish much. But if the members of the group are new to each other, then the experience can really serve as a valuable way to break the ice and to begin learning how the others think and operate and to create some goals together as a group. This kind of experience is especially effective with youth groups, because they tend to be more open to trying new things, they’re less scared of failing, and they are ok with having fun in front of people they don’t know well.
There is one scenario which inevitably dooms the experience to being a complete waste of time. This occurs when the office manager or supervisor doesn’t fully participate or is absent or, worst of all, when s/he is there the whole day but only watches and never joins in any of the exercises. That’s a perfect setup for 100% disingenuous behavior by every other member of the group.
It seems to me that a lot of the team building exercises are geared towards physical activity - climb a rope, build a raft, etc. when almost all of the companies involved really want you to feel better about the overtime you’re putting in behind a desk.
As a completely non-coordinated, outdoor hating, rather be inside kinda person, I hate these things. I don’t play frisbee golf for fun, so why the hell would I want to play a game with my boss?
The customer service ones are worse. We had a regional manager fly in, and read word for word our customer service promise on a laminated sheet. We all have a copy at our desks anyways, and my location is always tops in service in surveys. Complete waste of time, and we had to work OT to get caught up.
Oh, man. I had to sit through a two and a half hour PowerPoint lecture yesterday, with some schmuck telling us not to think of ourselves as employees, but rather as stewards and servants. Excuse me? Do you see me on my knees emptying the coal scuttle? Am I wearing a frilly cap and apron? Servant, my ass.
Then we watched a video about the power of positive thinking. I’m so glad I didn’t have to spend the day doing anything, y’know, productive or related to my job. :rolleyes:
“We wil nurture a culture which relies on and respects our diversity and each individual’s strengths and talents while working together toward successfully reaching common goals.”
The above group mission statement is the final product of 3 department meetings (representing about 120 man-hours) of team building, vision, values, service, BS, etc.
Since we came up with that, we’ve had no, absolutely none, nada, not even a little smidgen of:
-politics
-turf battles
-backstabbing
-withholding of info
-lack of strategy
-budget issues
-client complaints
Ironically, there are three or four director/manager level people who push this team crap on us every few months, but they are the worst offenders of mismanaging their own work or departments and treating people with a lack of respect.
Have you done the “Fish” thing yet? That was our latest glurge from management.
The Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle is a really fun place. They throw fish around the store - they chant & chatter & make all sorts of fun stuff out of their jobs. This fun workplace has been packaged into corporate training complete with books & videos & Powerpoint presentations.
Yes! Harness the power of this great fun process to improve morale & improve productivity! A fun workplace is a productive workplace! Yes! Better than cheese moving & better that TQM, its FISH!
We will have spontaneaity now! You will have fun! Now! Please see your Fish Committee (really!) member for more information.
We used to attend “team-building workshops” all the time in the old days. Of course, back then we called it “going to the nearest bar together and getting shit-faced.”
I used to work in the research subsidiary of a high tech company. Back a few years ago when we had much more money, the group I belonged to LOVED these things. It seemed that every time some new ‘philosophy’/approach/‘paradigm’ was available (ie the same old philosophy with new buzzwords, activities, and books), our management brought in the latest consultants to improve our area.
We did:
Myers-Briggs
2 sessions of Balderidge a year apart (which some people called Balderdash training)
One session that was a survival type thing but on paper (ie You have crashed in the subarctic and can only carry X things from this list, what do you keep)
Mission writing sessions
Learning the ropes (The ropes, trust fall, crossing the acid river problem solving game)
During the session and for a couple of days afterwards, management was all pumped about any self-discovery made by the group and by the ‘action plans’ we were developing to improve. Then as everybody had little time to continue on with the action plans, the energy would die out. Then when the new philosophy came around with new buzzwords, management would think that this was the new panacea (forgetting that we had already experienced the previous new panacea with no changes to the group).
The ‘learning the ropes’ was great fun. I was in a highly disfunctional group were no one trusted anyone. (One guy refused to do the trust fall) . (I had one colleague I trusted and he trusted me and that was about it). However, the group was highly intelligent. The first activity had us divide into two groups and solve a variety of problems/puzzles. At the end of the activity, the scores and answers of both groups were compared as well as determining what the score would have been if both groups worked together. (The facilitator pointed out he never told us to work as two separate groups when he divided us, so we need to challenge assumptions). The exercise was supposed to show that by working all together, we would achieve a better score. However, as I mentioned, we were all quite bright and the colleague who I trusted and myself were both avid puzzler types. Our group ‘won’, missing perhaps 1 or 2 answers. The other group didn’t miss that many more than we did. We the results we combined, our group might have had one point higher if we had worked with the other group.
As for the other activities, we succeeded in every challenge thrown to us. Theoretically, we were supposed to learn that working together was the only way to solve the problems. And while some activities did require some degree of co-operation, we still worked together in a very disfunctional way. I still remember the facilitator at the end of the session telling us he’ld never had a group perform so highly on the tests while performing so poorly as a group. When we returned to the office, of course, the basic trust problems and high egos still existed.
The most ‘Dilbert-esque’ session we had was when they brought in the ‘Gossip’ consultant to deal with our supposed ‘gossip’ problem. When we found out that we had gossip questionaires to fill out in preparation for a gossip management session, everyone was asking what’s going, why are we having this session. Supposedly there was serious gossip going around. We all found out the details of this gossip (which only a couple of admins and senior managers knew) when we started asking questions about what was going on - the memo on the gossip session actually created the gossip problem. To make matters worse, the questionnaire was insulting, the facilitator was pedantic, and the group’s director actually told more details of the gossip including the involved parties names during the session. (Even better was the fact that neither of the mentioned parties were present during the session!)
Maybe it’s a good thing that we have less money to waste in high tech these days!
I just happen to have the Dilbert take on this on my wall.
Panel 1: PHB says "I’m sending all of you to the “river and trees” management course.
Panel 2: He describes it, as performing a series of dangerous tasks that will depend on your creativity and ability to work together.
Panel 3: Dilbert: Oh, so it’s a team building exercise.
PHB: I think of it more as a headcount reduction thing.
My thoughts exactly when I did one a while ago, which culminated in climbing up a wall. One benefit of the crash is that no one has money for this kind of junk any more.
The team-building bit my last employer was heavy into was of the “group awareness training” variety rather than the physical “trust fall” and “meaningful arts and crafts” breed. There was some useful points involving the assumptions people bring to the table when meeting challenges, that perceptions happen through filters, etc., dressed up with some rhetorical strawmen and trick questions and transparent setups. (I irritated the coordinators by turboing everyong through a Prisoner’s Dilemma exercise by explaining exactly what it was, what was going on and the assumptions they were planning to pull a “gotcha ya!” on; once the majority got it, we all followed the known winning strategy, the other team caught on quickly to it–it’s a winning strategy for a reason–and we got through it about three times as fast as the coordinators were obviously planning on. Somewhere an angel gained its wings.)
Then everyone went back to work and the corporate culture returne to exactly what it was before.
My favorite is a Dilbert strip where they take a Myers Briggs type test:
Consultant: This personality test will help teach us how our fellow coworkers react to things diferently. For example…Dilbert here usues logic and reason to solve problems…Martin here on the other hand uses emotion and gut instinct.
Dilbert: Isn’t that just a polite way of saying Martin is an idiot?
The thing to remember is that the buisness world is largely bullshit. While fields like technology or engineering deal with concrete ways of doing things, selling, marketing, consulting, HR and the like are all based on peoples perception. If you look like you are acting as a team, then you are a team. If people perceive that you are successful, hard working and motivated, then you will be treated like a successful, hard working motivated person.
The end results of team building sessions is irrelevant. Managment does not hold them so they can get actual feedback. The important thing is to be able to point to it and say “look how much we value you!”. It’s a lot cheaper than giving everyone raises or vacation time.
I have been to only one reasonibly succesfull “team building session”. It lasted 8 weeks, went 24/7 and involved lots of yelling. They called it Basic Training. And even it didn’t build a team, it produced people who were ready to be team players.
You are not going to over write years of daily experience and personal interaction in an afternoon or over a weekend. You want productive, commited employees who work as a team, hire a coach, not micro-manager.
Cite, please. I presume if you’re claiming that the various team-building workshops are actually worthwhile, you’ve got some studies that back it up and explain why so many ‘team-building’ consultants are in different lines of work today?
I dunno what HR does at your company, but at any company I’ve ever seen, including my own, HR’s primary job is dealing with pay, pension and benefits, with a healthy side dish of legal work.
Maybe YOU don’t think your pay, pension and benefits are concrete things. If so, could you send yours to me?
Sorry, Riboflavin, you assume too much. This is IMHO, true? My claim is based on lots of personal experience and anecdotal information, which, last time I checked, was acceptable in this forum. I can’t speak for the alleged legions of trainers who are in other fields, though my guess is that they weren’t very good at what they do or that the twists and travails of a tetchy economy left them in the lurch when many businesses had to cut back on discretionary items. I do know that some of the consultants I’ve seen in action are simply fantastic at what they do and that, yes, sometimes team-building really works. But, again, as I stated previously, it’s more likely to succeed if you’ve got an audience that is open to trying.
I’ll chime in as a former ropes course facilitator/director.
Alot has to do with the stated goals of the retreat/experience. If the company “just thinks it’s a good idea” it probably isn’t going to get the group anywhere. If the discoveries made in the process aren’t committed to concrete action plans and followed up on, then it’s a waste of time (actually, it’s likely to be something long remembered which is never really a waste of time)
The “swinging from ropes” type stuff will
intensify the relationships between coworkers, for better or worse. What happens is that each person is forced to be more honest about who they really are and how they really behave. The group’s dynamics are very apparent during these activities.
If there is to be progress that comes of this heightened intensity, it’s the job of the facilitator to draw that out completely, and the job of the group to turn it into positive results. It’s like anything else in life, the more you put into it, the more you stand to get out of it.
In other words, it’s not like going to a mechanic and saying “fix it”
I get what you’re saying, but I don’t want intense relationships with my co-workers. They’re nice folks and I like them, but they’re not my friends. I don’t care who Co-Worker X really is, as long as she does her job and lets me do mine. And, frankly, it’s none of my co-workers’ business who I really am, as long as I get the job done.
burundi I could not have said it better myself. I, like Amethyst , work for a high tech company and have to endure almost every type of Team building activity mentioned so far. While I agree you get out what you put in, I WORK with these people and sometimes I get the “your not a team player” because I do not put in what is not relevant to that. I do not need all of my cow-orkers to be my friends or buddies. My personal life is just that, MINE. I get paid to do my job and not be buddies with people in my department who I rarely interact with. So for me it ends up being a lot of Fluff to make the dept. manager feel better while I have to work late to complete my normal work which did not stop cause I was making everyone warm and fuzzy.
In a lot of companies, HR is responsible for corporate culture stuff in addition to the payroll and benefits. In fact, some companies separate HR from Payroll and Benefits into separate departments. HR does the hiring, team building, diversity training, and performance reviews and the other depts are self explanatory.
At one company I worked at, they actually had a “Culture Team” in addition to the usual HR stuff.
For some reason, 90% of this crap all seems to take place at high-tech companies.
So, Pablito, what you’re saying is that there’s no hard evidence that ‘team building’ actually works and that when it doesn’t work, that merely shows that the people on the team were faulty, not the ‘team building’. IMHO, that’s kind of weak even for IMHO - the words ‘placebo effect’ begin to come to mind anytime someone talks about treatments that only work if you believe in them.
What I’d really like to see is a study comparing the benefits of team-building excercises with the benefits of giving the team-building excercise fee to the team - I wouldn’t exactly be shocked if just giving the cash to the team would probably motivate them better than going to a seminar that they know costs a lot of money. I know that senior management saying 'hey, here’s a big ‘ol wad of cash’ motivates me significantly more than ‘hey, here’s a chance to do some trust falls and look silly on a rope, which you know costs an arm and a leg’.
