5 Reasons Team Building Doesn't Work
Posted on November 09, 2010 by Guy Farmer, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Team building is a reflection of your leadership skills. Learn how to avoid the 5 common practices that can sabotage team building.
Many companies bring in a team building expert and feel great for a day or two and promptly go back to being at each other’s throats. This dynamic tends to give team building a bad name. Here are five reasons why team building doesn’t work in many companies.
1. Leadership isn’t involved. If your leaders aren’t involved then the rest of the employees feel like they don’t care.
2. Time isn’t set aside. Team building is an ongoing process, not a one-time shot. Successful companies set aside regularly scheduled time for team building activities.
3. The team building activities are superficial. Successful team building gets to the core issues that affect how people interact: behavior, thoughts and values. When we do activities that only scratch the surface we get shallow results.
4. Too many interruptions. We let our team building activities get derailed by phone calls or we allow people to not attend. Even phone calls can interrupt the flow of team building activities.
5. We don’t stick with it. Team building takes time and effort. It took a lot of time to create the current behaviors at your organization, it will also take time to learn and implement team building behaviors.
Team building is highly successful when we put the time and energy into it. Company leaders decide whether it’s important enough to make it happen. The next time you hear of a team building program that didn’t work you can usually surmise that the company just wasn’t ready. Are you?
Take care,
