As Published In February 2005

All Together Now
By Leeann Myers

Turning team play into team work

You've tried ropes courses, whitewater rafting—even an off-site, high-tech scavenger hunt. The events seem successful. But still, your team isn't communicating effectively, no one is clear on the group's objectives, and individual performers are out for themselves. What went wrong?

"The challenge of any team-building activity is that it has to be part of a longer-term process," explains Alexander Horniman, professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. "We typically have people going off site, and they do rapids and climb mountains. For most people, it's a high—they do things they never thought they'd do, and they do it with a team. There's a tremendous sense of accomplishment and bonding, and then it's over. It doesn't fit into a continuous learning process."

Where's the ROI?

Like any investment, team building should have defined goals and results. Yet organizations spend money on team building without demanding much in return. Stan Slap, a corporate strategist and consultant, says the focus of team training should be more than transitory bonding. "A meeting is an exorbitant use of resources in a company. Time, talent, dollars, interruption of work, sometimes travel cost—it's crazy. It should be on every manager's budget that they have to justify a meeting by the results."

This doesn't mean team-building events that are just fun have no value. For a new team or a larger work group, they can help members get to know each other. Employees see a different side of their colleagues, and this new perspective may encourage people to communicate better and collaborate informally. But unless the event is tied to workplace issues and is part of a larger focus on team building within the organization, the benefits are short-lived.

It's a Process

Companies that want to encourage teamwork need to look at the organization more holistically and, according to Michael Beyerlein, Ph.D., director of the Center for Collaborative Organizations at the University of North Texas, may need to do some realignment. "Support systems—including all the parts of performance management, such as rewards, measurement, feedback, training—are almost always focused on the individual. Executives need to look at the work processes and the relationships and the flow of information and the way decisions are handled and invest in making them better. The leading companies in most industries are doing that, and that's partly why they're the leading companies."

When it comes to team-building events, they should be part of a continuous process of ongoing learning, not one or two discontinuous events held at irregular intervals. Horniman explains that effective team building needs to include "a series of definable, measurable learning experiences—some of which are more academic in nature, some of which are more experiential in nature."

Finally, says Beyerlein, the quality of the outside facilitator is critical if team members are to make sense of their learning. At the end of a team-building event, participants should talk about the experience they had and connect it to how they work back at the office. "The facilitator can pick up things about how they relate to each other in terms of problem solving and decision making and then say, 'When does this happen at work? Why does it happen this way? How could you do it differently?'" he explains.

Is It Worth It?

If team building involves significantly more than organizing the occasional off-site activity, is it worth the investment? Horniman says yes: "If people work effectively as a team—that is, they're honest with each other; they trust and respect each other; and there's a high level of challenge, open disagreement, and conflict resolution—I absolutely believe that the performance of the enterprise will improve, and I absolutely believe that the bottom line will reflect it."