…they are too important.
At the risk of being criticised as a spoilsport or curmudgeon, I urge you to stop wasting valuable time and money on team building activities, team away days and corporate team events.
Yes, I have a personal bias – I can’t stand ‘forced fun.’
But my concern is more a professional one: the impacts of such events on the quality or quantity of work when back in the business are, according to research dating back to the 1980s, negligible, if present at all.
Limited impact
Such limited impact is not surprising when you consider the kind of events that take place vs. the sustainable changes that a team may well need to make.
Let’s just be clear: I’m not against games and fun per se.
It’s just that translating the learning from these ‘out of context’ activities back into the workplace, takes effort that most busy leaders don’t have to spare or are not willing to give.
Doing a ‘trust fall’ or building a bridge out of toilet rolls may be underpinned by both good intent and some clear learning objectives, but it doesn’t mean that two leaders who didn’t get on before the event will suddenly trust each other when back at the coal face.
Team dynamics
Team dynamics rarely shift in the long term as a result. The work being done on these corporate events is not real. Translation from a team away day back to the applied context of your business is too difficult for many to bother with. The result is your investment is at best diluted and, at worst, evaporates.
So, what is the alternative? To apply what we know about adult learning theory and package it up in a way that centres fully on where the team is currently and what it needs to do to make progress – either against its strategy or in relation to how it operates as a collective or, better still, both.
Thinking afresh
Team coaching, when executed well, helps a team raise its awareness of the team as a whole and the individuals within it.
Perspectives about what constitutes a team and how it might operate as part of wider systems can be explored – not as a theoretical exercise but as a way of thinking afresh about how your team could look and operate.
Team coaching also challenges the team to develop through tackling the important priorities of the real work they face.
Adults learn through applied and contextual problem solving.
Team coaching allows the time to be taken in various combinations, resulting in strengthened understanding and closer relationships. It also promotes a motivation towards action, for the benefit of the team as a whole, whilst remaining mindful of the drivers of individuals.
An understood roadmap
Team coaching is a complex and demanding process.
I recently had the joy of working alongside our Exigence Team Coaches with global senior teams in the Netherlands and Los Angeles.
If you had been a fly on the wall in either of those sessions, you would have seen tears, heard a lot of laughter, moments of quiet and, importantly, disagreement and large helpings of productive honesty.
At the end of the two-day sessions you would also have seen a crisp, clear and widely understood roadmap that the teams have committed to follow when back at work.
In six weeks’ time, we’ll go back and help each team reflect on its progress and work out what it still needs to do.
A proactive process
Developing a high performing senior team is a proactive process, that takes dedicated, focused time. Team coaching allows that to happen in a replicable way but where each team can make the specific progress it needs to, to work effectively together and whilst apart.
Exigence provides a full suite of evidence-based business coaching solutions, driven by a desire to help individuals and teams to achieve their performance potential. Find out more here or book a call to talk through how we can support you.
