CORPORATE MANAGERS

TEAM BUILDING

"Oh, no. Are we really going to talk about that stuff...
I have real work to do!"

"Have you ever heard someone say this when you even mention team building? An episode of "The X-Files" started with Mulder and Skully in their car driving to a team building session, with the implication that there are much more important things to be done.

Maybe so. But something has certainly ignited the business world’s appreciation for this concept that has been around so long. Even with this interest we seem to get it wrong a lot, so I thought it might be interesting to once again look at organizational team building in light of today’s realities.

Give me a "T" !
I think most people associate team building with the trivial, rah rah aspects of teams in competition. Our models, unfortunately, seem to be drawn from the sports world. I think about this as we struggle to understand the concept, then realize we have all been programmed to think this way.

For example, our early childhood experiences were dominated by school and play. In school, we were in a structured world whose reward system favored individual accomplishment. When a teacher asked a question, it was the person whose hand went up first who usually responded. You certainly didn’t see two or three students clustering to develop the best answer. When we took tests, we knew we were competing against the other students for the best scores.

When recess time came, we moved our activities out onto the playground where we frequently chose up teams to play ball or some other activity. On these teams we learned that we had to cooperate with others to succeed.

And so we moved through our school system learning that the way to succeed in the classroom (or "the real world") was to do it ourselves in an ongoing competition against others. On the playground, the system favored teaming.

A few years ago, in response to an inquiry about why they were implementing team concepts, the Assistant Superintendent for the Los Angeles Unified School System stated that "In the business world when people get together and work on a project, it’s called `teamwork.’ In schools, the way we’re teaching today, it’s called ‘cheating’."

So it is my strong belief that many of the problems we see in workplace teams are directly related to our early programming that teaming is for play and not really meant for real work. Workers, including senior managers, subconsciously write it off as some exercise to make everyone feel good. And so we struggle."

~ Peter Grazier, consultant, trainer, author.