Why Team-Building Rarely Works

Anne Thornley Brown wrote an interesting article on Why Companies Are Cutting Team-Building. In it, she offers these four reasons:

• too much focus on activities of questionable value
• not enough focus on results
• too little tie-in to the business
• no attempt to measure return on investment

And she's not wrong, but she's not entirely correct either. The problem is that Team-Building rarely includes adjusting Culture initiatives to support the Team-Building initiative.

What that means is that you can send you people out into the woods for a few days, sing a few verses of Kumbaya and get them to work together, but the moment they get back to work, if they have already built silos, the ingrained Culture will swallow the newly-minted Team-Building effort.

You see, Culture is stronger than any course. Culture is "the way it is." And in order for "the way it is" to change, you have to take aim directly at the problem. People working together isn't the problem. The team isn't the problem. The existing silos and work-flow based on working inside of silos is the problem. The Attitudes of why your people don't want to work with each other is the underlying problem. That isn't solved by pretending to like each other for a weekend or forcing them to work together when they don't want to. They know the Team-Building effort is only for a few days so they'll suck it up and grit their way through it. Then, come Monday, it'll be back to business as usual.

Team-Building, without addressing the underlying Culture, is like painting a car and hoping the new paint will stop the engine from burning oil. Nice effort - wrong place. You've got to get under the hood if you want to fix the problems. A new coat of paint won't cut it. It's the engine that's malfunctioning - not the paint job. You've got to fix the Culture - not the behaviors that result from the Culture.