Team Building - is it just a game?

A fine Friday morning and a brisk walk to work found me digging deep into the pages of Linked In to find some nuggets of wisdom hidden somewhere within. I read a few posts, nudged a few new contacts, and stumbled upon this.

An interesting discussion thread I thought - so I posted a reply which you can read by following the link, but I also want to publish my thoughts here.

"I will obviously defend team building activities since it is a large part of what I do, but I use the worn-out moniker of team building as a coined term. You can play games and have meetings until you're blue in the face, lets be honest - change only occurs if the people involved want it to. I can facilitate for hours and give insights, tips etc, but using me as a consultant is always going to be a waste of money if the Managers and Team Members have no desire to change their habits and the way they work.

Just like anything that requires a change of outlook, attitude and mindset, it requires effort on both parts to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Take weight loss as a poignant case in point. People who try fad diets and expect to reach a target weight as if by magic, sadly remain overweight. Those who make a conscious effort to change habits, enjoy far better results.

I therefore suggest that while some team building activities are linked tenuously at best to the overall outcomes required, it takes more than expecting a consultant to wave a magic wand and for a companies problems to vanish overnight.

I think alot of people in business tend to get blinded by conceptual theory and analysis - at the end of the day (and I don't mean this to sound as crude as it does) any team is just a group of people trying to do something together, and unless they're very very lucky people and love their job, they're probably thinking they'd rather be somewhere else. Contempt breeds contempt, so far from the 'skipping through a flowery meadow' image that most "team building" companies love to portray, the reality is usually more an exercise in damage control and pointing out to delegates that they will find life as a whole a far more pleasant experience if they put some time into forging stronger relationships with the people around them.

They don't have to be best friends, they don't have to swap recipes or watch the game together - they just need to be able to say "Hey, I don't think that's a good idea" or "yep, sure, I'll get that done so we can get this project finished".

Office politics is the mortal enemy of effective teamwork, in my personal opinion - gossip, intrigue, scandal. I've seen the most effective workers are those who ignore this and "just get on with it".

In a nutshell, I don't feel that demonizing Team Building is accurate, nor is it fair. We should perhaps take more time to look inwardly and question whether it is the processes employed that stand in the path of change, or is it us?