I love my coworkers: they’re the best part of my current work location. I’ve never worked with a better bunch of people. And I still hate doing mandated team-building things with them: we (or at least I) feel that they’re demeaning, patronizing wastes of time.
We build our team by talking after school, by exchanging lesson plans, by hosting and attending parties, by commenting on one another’s baby pictures on Facebook, by discussing management strategies for difficult behavior problems, by touching base with teachers who previously had a student to find out some history or some useful strategies, and so on. And yeah, sometimes we build teamwork by bitching about the absurd, infuriating uselessness of the official teambuilding sessions–but those bitchfests are a pretty small part of the teambuilding, and could easily be replaced.
If you are the kind of person who will only interact with their coworkers under corporate fiat, the place where I work is probably not for you.
Here’s the thing. Interact != “Be friends with”. Of the stuff you listed in your second paragraph, exchanging lesson plans, discussing management strategies and touching bases about students? Fine. You can interact on any of those points without being inappropriately close. And discussing a co-worker’s baby pictures on their facebook page? WAAAAAAAYYY too close. I’m there to work, not to bond. I don’t need a corporate fiat to know that the workplace is more pleasant and productive
I get along with my co-workers, I enjoy their company in the workplace, it’s fun to spend a minute or two bitching about some dumbass corporate policy or talking about a movie or sports or something. I don’t want to be friends with most of them. I don’t want to go out for a drink after work, I don’t want to have parties at their houses. I don’t need a corporate fiat to know that the workplace is more pleasant and productive if we’re all civil and act politely towards one another. This idea (not yours, although yours has a small degree of it) that we need to be “friends” with our co-workers, go to dinner with them, see their baby pictures, know about their marital problems, hug them close…that’s drivel that’s shown up in the last, say, 20 years. Frankly I submit a workplace where people are civil but not over-friendly works better.
My take is that much modern teambuilding is crud. It is just a way to seperate money from companies. But this does not mean that teambuilding is a bad idea. Far from it. However to actually do teambuilding one needs a team. Just taking a bunch of poeple that work together at a company and doing teambuilding is silly. But if you are assembling a new team to do a project, teambuilding is vital. But it only works at the start. You can’t go teambuilding after the things starts. The most critical thing is to build the team before anyone gets to the point of deciding that one of the their members is a jerk, lazy, or whatever. This is why so much teambuilding is a waste of time. But a project manager that understands the real need to build a team at the outset is much more likely to bring in the project without problems.
Anything can be done to build a team. But the less related to the job roles the better. A dinner party where everyone pitches in a cooks is a good one. I really like the Habitat for Humanity and LN-4 projects. One thing one often finds is that it is those people that begrudge the time spent, and just want to “get on with the job” are those that most need the social bonding with their team, otherwise they end up being the most likely cause of problems.
Some years ago I taught software engineering. One very sucessful thing I introduced was a teambuilding excercise. This I did with the specific intent of creating teams from random selections of students. There was a one semester, very intense team programming effort. Six students per team. We were careful, and sometimes overt, in out desire to create random mixes of students. You got strong and weak students in the same team, and usually a quite diverse ethnic mix. Typically there were no friends on the same team. Experience showed that many teams had personality clashes, and other issues that interfered, sometimes seriously, with the project. So I introduced a teambuilder. We had almost no time in the semester. But the nature of the project and course allowed a tiny window. So the task in the week immediatly after the team memberships were published was this. Every team had to create a team poster. The poster had to be for the team as a small software company, one that specialised in the project area. Each poster had to introduce the team members, and look like an advert for the team. There were restirictions on the allowed technology, with an emphasis on glue, scissors, and simple crafty things. No big professional printed posters created with pro grade software. We supplied paper, access to simple B/W laser printing, coloured pencils, glue etc. The results exceeded our wildest hopes. The posters ranged from the very good to the brilliant (and for a bunch of geek students this was saying something) but the effect on the interpersonal relationships of the teams, and the overall ethos, morale, and project success was extraordinary.
The bottom line is simple. Teambuilding is IMHO absolutely critical. But you need to understand what it is you are doing. You need an actual team to build. A team is not the company. It is a small group of people who are tasked with responsibility for something specific. They need to be in a position to invest something of themselves into the team, and therefore something of themseves in the success of the project. Just day to day running of a company’s operations does not fit this. And you must do this right at the start. There is very little value after things have got underway. Sadly I usually see commercial teambuilding activities sold into corporations that really perform no useful task. Paintball is pretty much just an excuse to legally shoot your already despised manager or teammate. The team leader should be the person that instigates the teambuilding, not some higher level manager, and they should have the flexibility to choose the manner of the excercise. Teams develop a personality of their own, and the initial stages of the team’s development are critical to how this turns out.
Understand I’m not saying what I describe ought to be mandatory, or even that it’s superior to a professional-distance-style workplace. It’s just the one I have, and I consider myself very fortunate to work with people that I genuinely like. I’ve worked other places where I really didn’t want to go to work parties or have a drink with coworkers after-hours, and those places could work just fine, too.
It seems to me that some of the team-building exercises are an artificial attempt to build friendships among co-workers. I’m saying that if that doesn’t happen organically, it’s not likely to happen among us, uh, “worker bees,” no matter how much the drones wish it would.
I’ve working on a team-building method which uses World of Warcraft. It takes a little time (so is better done at work) but it’s intended to accomplish several things:
First, it pulls people out of the immediate day-to-day crunch of work. You don’t really bond with people when you’re dealing with reports and deadlines all the time. But you get to hang around in a cute fantasy world and nothing here really matters. Nothing bad will happen if you “fail” (that’s part of learning the game sometimes). People can relax a bit (without the tension of paintball, which is a good but decidedly more adrenaline-fuelled method).
Second, it presents a situation (not unlikie work) where you have to work together to accomplish a goal - a very arbitrary goal you might not otherwise care about.
Third, it lets poeople define their own roles to a great degree. You can be a tank, healer, DPS, whatever. I think this is hugely important to group success in the real world, too, because people vary hugely in their group performance function. I think possibly THE biggest diference between one manager and another is how perceptive that person is in looking at people’s innate skills. Are they cheerleaders or task-focused? Are they slow and steady or quick and energetic? Because everyone has different personality in how they accomplish things, and the comany wouldn’t succeed very well if everyone was alike.
You’re doing something together that’s not what you normally do in the office every day.
I’m sure some team building events are strained and awkward. The ones I went to never were. We enjoyed ourselves and enjoyed a day away from the office.
A team building event isn’t going to radically change everything–if the office sucks and everyone hates each other, it’s not going to fix a big problem like that. But on balance, it’s usually a positive thing to do.
Our teambuilding exercise consisted of putting a shitload of toys gether assembly-line style for charity. Basically we are all given rolls and deadlines and set to work as if we were a small company. Since we are a management consulting firm, it is actually relevant to the type of work we do and how we do it. And if nothing else, it is actually providing something useful to some kids. It also provides some insight into what the company expects of employees - basically that we are supposed to be able to come together on an unfamiliar project and quickly form a team and produce some results. That wasn’t too bad.
Normally though, teambuilding seems to just consist of a corporate boondoggle that only serves to provide an environment for employees to get drunk and maybe cheat on their wives.
Really I find most HR mandated activities to be bullshit. I’ve spent days learning about the “culture” and “core values” and “coaching” and whatnot. I’ve learned very little about how to actually perform my job. To a certain extent I think our teambuilding activity was a metaphore for consulting in general. Take a bunch of smart people with a lot of enthusiasm and set them to work on an activity they don’t really know how to do.
A few years ago I worked at a bike shop, and every few months the owner would take us to a nudie bar (all employees were young unmarried guys). He’d buy gallons of beer and give us handfuls of ones.
Seriously, it really did help us forget our minor personal spats at work and get to ‘bond’ with each other away from the stress of work. It also helped us to loosen up around the owner and get to know him, whom we rarely saw around the shop.
He also owned two other shops, and every year would have a company dinner, completely paid for, at a nice restaurant. There we got a chance to meet and hang out with the people we only really knew from talking on the phone. (And then we all went to a nudie bar).
Team building exercises - even competitive ones - can work. The problem occurs when people take the exercises (and themselves) too seriously.
For example, a raft-building competition can either descend into a sort of reconstruction of the Battle of Midway, or it can be a fun day out from which people return with a happy collection of memories and anecdotes about the magnificence of the winning entry and the hapless guys whose raft disintegrated, dumping them into two feet of tidal silt - and all participants can share equally in those memories and anecdotes, regardless who they were on the day.
Of course there’s no way to guarantee that’s what will happen, but a team in which people take themselves too seriously maybe isn’t, and cannot really be a proper team anyway.
I don’t really call that “team building”. That’s just “blowing off steam”.
I remember a few years back, we did this corporate teambuilding thing where they flew the whole group (about a couple hundred people) from all the offices to some centeral location. So at breakfast on the last day, this idiot associate who I personally felt was constantly full of a particular kind of shit is like “these things are great because you get to network with people from other offices.” So I’m like “name three people you met on this trip not from our office” to which he immediately could not.
Heh, back in the day, actually knowing and caring about the people who you spend the vast majority of your time with was considered to be more important. This sort of atomized ‘don’t touch me’ style of culture is a development that seems to have risen to prominence over the past 50 years.
I really cannot fathom the sort of life you prefer. It sounds so impersonal and dehumanizing. ‘work=money’ is so depressing to me. I much prefer to work with people that I care about, and for the most part I have that opportunity.
I’ve yet to see a team-building exercise that wasn’t a complete WOFTAM*. They make Head Office level management feel good but I think most people in businesses see very little reason to interact with people from completely unrelated departments.
In my own experience, for example, it didn’t do any good to “build teams” involving stores 125kms away, as we’d never have to deal with them. But it looked good in the company newsletter.
*Waste Of Fucking Time And Money
Never been a manager, have you? You, as a manager, may be competing with other managers. If so, a team who is most efficient through cooperation is going to help you do better than the other managers. Not to mention that many people discover pretty soon that they get more done cooperating than competing.
Having fun together in a group collaboration builds all kinds of positive things. At the least, experiencing co-workers in a different context outside the office in play clothes making big blunders helps us appreciate their human-ness, as well as our own. At the end of the day that’s all we all are.
Not to be overlooked is the perks of paintball: survival skills. You just never know…
What sucks even more about ours is that it’s not during office hours, it’s to be on Saturdays. And it is considered mandatory, despite being obviously unpaid.