Team Building and Ensuring Goals are Met : Same Thing

Posted by: Timm J. Esque | Posted on: January 23rd, 2012 | 1 Comments

What bothers me most about team building approaches I have witnessed and read about (or worse yet, had to participate in) is when they are acitivites separate from getting the team’s real work done.  This doesn’t have to be the case, and never should be.  By far, the best team building I’ve witnessed occured in regular work meetings.

Many team building models show trust, communication and other so-called “soft” skills as  foundational to team building.   A recent example is Patrick Lencioni’s best selling “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”.  His pyramid model shows lack of trust as the first dysfunction that must be overcome.  Lencioni’s book is a quick read and a pretty good example of how to get a team out of dysfunction.  If you’ve read it, you may recall that while the protaganist calls a series of “executive retreat” meetings, what they do in the meetings is real work:

1. getting very clear about priorites and top goals so that they have a way of knowing if they are improving,

2. reviewing progress with the permission and the expectation that peers will hold each other accountable, and

3. hashing out how resources should best be utilized in order to ensure top priorities are met, etc.

As the leader takes the team through these steps (in the book) she makes it very clear that no team member can be successful unless the entire team is successul.

At the end of the story there is a summary about how to progress through (get past) the 5 dysfunctions.  After demonstrating that team building occurs while doing real work, I thought this section fell back into the fallacy of team building as separate from doing the real work.  Even so, Lencioni points out that to get through the first step of overcoming lack of trust, team members need opportunities to make promises to each other and follow through on them.  At Ensemble, we put a huge emphasis on this with our Commitment-based approach.  Work review meetings are designed to make sure team members are making and meeting promises (commitments) to each other every week throughout a project.   With the CBPM approach, every meeting is a team building meeting even though zero meetings are dedicated to team building activities.